Choreographing Exhibitions: A book and a festival by Mathieu Copeland
Saturday, 30 November, noon–midnight
Centre d’art contemporain de la Ferme du Buisson
allée de la Ferme
F–77186 Noisiel
The book
To be launched on 30 November 2013
In 2008, the Contemporary art center La Ferme du Buisson, and the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen invited Mathieu Copeland to curate A Choreographed Exhibition. Exclusively composed of “movements” written by eight artists—Jonah Bokaer, Philipp Egli, Karl Holmqvist, Jennifer Lacey, Roman Ondák, Michael Parsons, and Fia Backström & Michael Portnoy—and executed by three dancers over two months, the exhibition represents a landmark in the history of the relationship between dance and the visual arts.
Beyond the unique experience it represented for those who were there, A Choreographed Exhibition raised a multitude of questions that have made their way into the book Choreographing Exhibitions. Both a manifest and an anthology, the book brings together more than thirty international visual artists, choreographers, musicians, filmmakers, theorists and curators. A remarkable overview of the relation between choreography and exhibitions, it conducts a polyphony through five perspectives: score, space, time, the body, and memory.
Featuring Kenneth Anger, Fia Backström, Jérôme Bel, Julien Bismuth, Giovanni Carmine, Boris Charmatz, Mathieu Copeland, Tim Etchells, Barbara Formis, Maite Garbayo Maeztu, Kenneth Goldsmith, Amy Greenfield, Abbie Hoffman, Karl Holmqvist, Pierre Huyghe, Myriam Van Imschoot, Jennifer Lacey, Leclubdes5, Franck Leibovici, Pablo León de la Barra, André Lepecki, Alan Licht, Raimundas Malašauskas, Loreto Martínez Troncoso, Malcolm McLaren, Gustav Metzger, Lilo Nein, Phill Niblock, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Michael Parsons, Julie Pellegrin, Mickaël Phelippeau, Michael Portnoy, Claude Rutault, Irena Tomažin, Catherine Wood
A coedition: Mathieu Copeland / Centre d’art contemporain de la Ferme du Buisson, Noisiel, France / Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland.
With the support of Fluxus, Franco-British fund for contemporary art.
Distribution: Les presses du réel
www.lespressesdureel.com
ISBN : 978-2-84066-682-0
The festival
Saturday 30 November, from midday to midnight
As an echo to the book, La Ferme du Buisson has invited Mathieu Copeland to program a festival in all its venues (the theatre, the cinema and the art centre) that brings together contemporary dance, visual arts, music and cinema. Celebrating both the book and the authors, this one-day event includes a series of talks, screenings, along with a continuous polyphony of voices and movements, in which three performers embody time-based works by Carl Andre, Tim Etchells, Kenneth Goldsmith, Franck Leibovici, Title TK (Cory Arcangel, Howie Chen and Alan Licht), Loreto Martínez Troncoso, Irena Tomažin and Myriam Van Imschoot.
Mathieu Copeland (b. 1977, living in London)
Independent curator and editor Mathieu Copeland cultivates a practice that seeks to subvert the traditional role of exhibitions and to renew our perceptions of them. Notably, he co-curated the exhibition Vides, Une Rétrospective at the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Bern Kunsthalle, and organized many exhibitions including Soundtrack for an Exhibition and Alan Vega at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, A Choreographed Exhibition at the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen and the Centre d’art contemporain de la Ferme du Buisson in Noisiel, and initiated the series A Spoken Word Exhibition, An Exhibition to Hear Read, and the Reprises. He lectures at the HEAD – Geneva University of Art and Design, and teaches in numerous universities and art schools. In 2013, he curated retrospective exhibitions of Phill Niblock (Circuit & Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne) and Gustav Metzger (Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyon). He is currently the guest curator for the Satellite programme at the Jeu de Paume, Paris.
