Isaac Julien
25 May - 15 August 2005
Jeppe Hein
15 September - 14 November 2005
Espace 315
A new address inside the Centre Pompidou
Located in the South Gallery on the mezzanine level
From 25 May 2005 to 15 August 2005, Centre Pompidous Espace 315, wich is devoted to the young generation of contemporary artists, presents two video installations by Isaac JULIEN : Baltimore (2003) and Creol Phantom (2005).
From 15 September 2005 to 14 November 2005, Espace 315 will welcome the Invisible labyrinth by Jeppe HEIN.
ISAAC JULIEN
25 MAY 15 AUGUST 2005
From 25 May through 15 August, 2005 Isaac Julien presents his recent works including Creol Phantom (2005) made especially for this exhibition. Isaac Julien was born in London in 1960 and studied at St Martins School of Art. He became highly regarded at the end of the 1980s for his documentary and feature films. Isaac Julien currently orients his work towards audio-visual installations and photography. He is one of the most promising artists of his generation.
Interbreeding, or what Edouard Glissant calls creolisation, is at the heart of Isaac Juliens investigation. The artists formal penetration amounts to a massive critique of our Wester-oritned view of the world, played out across an audio-visual installation. The result creates uneasy and complex questions for the viewer. Isaac Julien essentially renegotiates black identity within our world culture. His installations dissect our cultures various metaphors for voyage, for example, from Africa to the North Pole, as well as the entrenched and stifling symbolism of established cultural places (museums and libraries), and the other modes of expression (cinema, dance, performance).
At a time when the visual arts, through countless numbers of exhibitions, conferences and productions, focus on post-colonial theories, Isaac Julien brings together these critical reflections and repositions them in a field that is very much his own. Conceived as intertextual journeys, the two audio-visual installations presented Fantôme Créole, 2005 (created specifically for this exhibition) and Baltimore, 2003, (acquired by the Centre Pompidou, Musée National dArt Moderne) portray rich and sometimes uncomfortable narrative journeys.
Photographs produced during the shooting of Baltimore and Fantôme Créole accompany the exhibition, showing the relationships between the architecture, the landscape and the film crew, illuminating thus the production process.
IN AND AROUND THE EXHIBITION
JUNE 13 at 6:30pm, CINEMA 2, LEVEL -1
Isaac Julien will present some of his works as part of the series Video and After.
JUNE 1st at 7:30pm, PETITE SALLE, LEVEL -1
« Revue parlée » with Isaac Julien, Mark Nash, Cerpanin Marimouton and Françoise Vergés
Curator
Christine Van Assche, curator Musée national dart moderne, Centre Pompidou, espace Nouveaux Médias
JEPPE HEIN
SEPT. 15 NOV. 14 2005
As part of the 2005 programme, Centre Pompidous Espace 315 has invited the Danish artist Jeppe Hein to create a site-specific project. Planned for September 2005, this exhibition will permit the parisian public to discover for the first time the work of this young artist who has already made a mark on the international scene, in particular at the Venice Biennale and in New York.
Be they geometrical refined objects or installations that are both discrete and playful, Jeppe Heins interventions place him in the continuum of the Minimalist sculpture tradition. Yet, at the same time, his pieces set up an incongruous dialogue which the viewer. His work, which is very much a reflection on architecture, sets out to demonstrate the modularity of space, both by constructing it and deconstructing it.
Born in 1974 in Copenhagen, Jeppe Hein studied at the Royal Academy of Arts of Copenhagen and at Frankfurts Hochschule für Bildende Künste. He lives and works in Berlin.
His oeuvre is based upon the principle that the viewer can modify a work through his or her direct experience of it. The spectator can thus be a catalyst in several ways. There are works where the presence of a visitor can set into motion apparently inanimate objects, releasing a surprising mechanism; and inversely, certain pieces become animated only in the absence of the public. Jeppe Hein thus exploits the deceptive potential of the work of art, using humor to push back the limits of conceptual art. Always linked to the situation within a space, Jeppe Heins works disturb the environment and our relationship to it. The artist is inspired directly by the spatial environment in situ. The term intervention, therefore, seems an appropriate one for Jeppe Heins works, since they introduce a disquieting element into either neutral spaces (galleries, museums) or ordinary public spaces. Certain works are so discrete that they merge with the museums own structure. If these objects obey the formal Minimal and Conceptual Art rule of the effacement of the maker, they are not however denoted as artworks until the moment they are innocently activated by the viewer, who, in that act, makes them exist as such thus embracing the Duchampian tradition. If Conceptual Art delivers a critical reflection on the exhibition space, Jeppe Hein seems to play quite seriously with the codes of the utopia of the white cube, with the aim of destabilizing the museum habits of the viewers.
The exhibition at the Centre Pompidou is Jeppe Heins first in Paris. The artist participated in the Venice Biennial in 2003. More recently, he exhibited at PS1 in New York City, and in 2005 he will show work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
Curator
Christine Macel, curator for contemporary art in charge of the department of Prospective and contemporary creation, Musée national dart moderne, Centre Pompidou
