2020 program

2020 program of exhibitions at CAPC in Bordeaux
The CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, under the artistic direction of its new Director Sandra Patron and Chief Curator Alice Motard, announces three highlight events in its 2020 program.

Each of these events presents an opportunity to discover the rich program tied to both permanent exhibitions and new events at the CAPC: the Cosa mentale space, a new residency program, and a new lecture series by Guillaume Désanges.

For artists, curators, and other contributors to the CAPC program, Cosa mentale offers a space for expression that is fundamentally different to a normal exhibition. It can be a place to further develop thought and research, to share sources, to encourage collaborative peer-work, or to promote connections.

In fall 2020, CAPC launches a new residency program which has no preconceived form or duration. It functions as a place for selected artists to access the program of exhibitions at the CAPC in order to infiltrate and invade them, capitalize on their strengths and reveal their weaknesses. In short, bringing the program to life and in sync with contemporary creation whilst addressing—furtively but no less profoundly—the here and now.

Guillaume Désanges extends his conference program Des histoires contre l’Histoire under the title Célébrations critiques. In this series, he more specifically pursues a critical revision of art history, emphasizing the past and present links between art, power, and ideology. The CAPC has commissioned two brand new talks, respectively scheduled for the sessions in May and June 2020.

Spring 2020: Opening April 15 

Samara Scott: The Doldrums
April 16–September 27, 2020
Curator: Alice Motard
For her first major project this side of the Channel, Samara Scott (b. 1985, London) takes over the great nave of the CAPC, installing a huge artificial ceiling composed of constantly evolving organic and chemical substances. The public is invited to walk around and under it, to experience the dual identity of this large-scale alchemical collage, both digital and material, seductive and repulsive.

At the CAPC, the artist has suspended a transparent membrane which divides the central space of the art museum horizontally, creating a flat 10,000 square-foot canopy over the impressive nave at mezzanine level. On this surface Scott has created a massive, colorful, “pictorial”, multimedia composition using plastics, textiles, fluids, and scrap objects, as well as substances like coffee, sugar, cotton and spices, which hark back to the historical use of the CAPC building as a warehouse for colonial goods in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

With the support of Fluxus Art Projects, a Franco-British program for contemporary art supported by the French Ministry of Culture, the Institut français and the British Council.

Irma Blank: BLANK
April 16–September 20, 2020
Curators: Johana Carrier & Joana P. R. Neves
Passionate about literature and language, Irma Blank (b. 1934, Celle, Germany) moved to Sicily in 1955. This geographic, cultural and linguistic uprooting was the foundation of her work. Realizing that "there is no such thing as the right word", she started working on her first series of introspective drawings, Eigenschriften ("self-writings" 1968–1973). This was the start of a lifetime of work based on the association between writing and drawing, stripping words of their usual meaning.

The retrospective exhibition BLANK has seven iterations that are adapted to each of the touring venues. In collaboration with Culturgest, Lisbon (Portugal); Mamco, Geneva (Switzerland); CCA and Bauhaus Foundation, Tel Aviv (Israel); ICA Milano (Italy); Museo Villa dei Cedri, Bellinzona (Switzerland) and Bombas Gens, Valencia (Spain).

Project supported by the Italian Council (7th Edition, 2019) program to promote Italian contemporary art in the world by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism.

Summer 2020: Opening June 25 

Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
A Decentered Gaze on the CAPC Collection
June 26, 2020–Spring 2022 (closing date to be determined)
Curator: Sandra Patron
Borrowing its title from Julio Cortázar’s book, this exhibition offers a new look at the major pieces from the CAPC collection through renewed systems of representation of the world. Like most European institutions, the CAPC built and developed its collection through a male, European, and more broadly, Western prism, in spite of the historical heritage of Bordeaux, whose commercial and cultural development from the seventeenth century came from Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

Now, in an era where cultural, social, and political factors affect how viewers—and art historians—interpret work, it is essential to look at public collections with fresh eyes. These collections must pave the way for a decentralized world that puts at the forefront those artists who, for various reasons (gender, nationality), were previously marginalized in the canon of art history.

Fall 2020: Opening November 5

Eva Koťátková
Site-specific project for the nave
November 6, 2020–May 23, 2021
Curator: Sandra Patron
Czech artist Eva Koťátková constructs symbolic environments mixing collage, sculpture, photography, drawing, and photomontage. Her work, largely influenced by theatre, questions modern society by examining the disfunction of social systems. By engaging with our way of thinking, learning, and behaving, she draws attention to the impact of social conventions on individuals.

Koťátková’s installations are interspersed with stories whose narrative structures are more fragmentary than linear, sparking more imaginative and intuitive reactions than rational ones.

Caroline Achaintre
October 17, 2020–January 17, 2021
Curator: Alice Motard
The work of Caroline Achaintre bears testimony to the artist’s atypical curriculum, which led her from a blacksmith workshop in Germany to the textile department of the Goldsmiths College in London, as well as to the eclecticism of her inspirations and tastes, which range from the claimed primitivism of Die Brücke to the postmodern design of the Memphis group. It is therefore hardly surprising that she should create a kind of productive friction by juxtaposing hand tufted rugs and anthropomorphic ceramic sculptures (amphibian faces and carnivalesque, sometimes fetishist masks) in installations equally reminiscent of window shop displays and ethnographic cabinets.

The exhibition is organized in collaboration with Belvedere 21, Vienna; MO.CO. Panacée, Montpellier, and Fondazione Giuliani, Rome.

Still on view
Histoire de l’art cherche personnages…
Curators: Alice Motard with Anne Cadenet and François Poisay (CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux); Anne Hélène Hoog (Cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l’image, Angoulême); Yan Schubert (Fondation Gandur pour l’Art, Geneva)
Until March 22, 2020

The CAPC musée d’art contemporain is a museum of the City of Bordeaux.

Museum patrons
Honorary patron: Château Haut-Bailly

Founding patron: Les Amis du CAPC
Patrons: SUEZ, Château Chasse-Spleen, Château Haut Selve

Press
Pedro Jiménez Morrás
T +33 (0)5 56 00 81 70 / p.jimenezmorras@mairie-bordeaux.fr