La Position de l’Amour

Magasin, National Centre for Contemporary Art (CNAC) in Grenoble, France, is pleased to announce its reopening on November 18, 2022, with the inaugural artistic programme “La Position de l’Amour.”

Magasin CNAC reopens its doors to the public and artists, under the leadership of its new director Céline Kopp. To celebrate this milestone event, Magasin CNAC’s inaugural programme “La Position de l’Amour”—translating as: From this Position of Love—includes a diversity of forms and is conceived as a genuine invitation, through the experience of art, to open up spaces for encounters and debates.

La Position de l’Amour is the title of a group exhibition that brings together eleven artists around notions of engagement and love as practice—both as a way of knowing and as a way of being present to the world, and with others, that may lead towards ways of doing (with: Rebecca Bellantoni, Ivan Cheng, Ufuoma Essi, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Célin Jiang, Valentin Noujaïm, Prune Phi, Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, Anna Solal, and Alvaro Urbano).

Alongside the group show, Magasin CNAC presents Binta Diaw’s solo exhibition Paysages, curated by Alexia Pierre and Noémie Pirus-Hassid, in collaboration with ESAD Grenoble—Valence, in resonance with a festival conceived by Simone Frangi and Katia Schneller. To continue celebrating the reopening of Magasin CNAC, and the need for such spaces, the “Festival des Gestes de la Recherche” is taking place from November 21st to 24th, with a late night programming of performances, sound, and a series of encounters interrogating the fluid notion of citizenship.

The programme also includes the inauguration of a series of new commissions by Stromboli Design (Alexis Bondoux, Laure Jaffuel, Natacha Mankowski, and Clémence Seilles) produced on site throughout the year with a commitment to sustainable practices (upcycling on-site materials, collaboration with local craftspeople and communities). These new commissions accompany a repurposing of spaces dedicated to audiences led by Cookies, a design and architecture studio, as well as an experimentation on the visual history and future transitions of the institution by the graphic design duo Alliage.

Lastly, Magasin CNAC is pleased to launch a residency programme as part of its new vision, valuing experimentation and peer to peer learning with artist Cindy Bannani (alum of ESAD Grenoble—Valence), and Giselle’s books cofounder Lucas Jacques Witz, as well as a core partnership with artist Xavier Antin and La Fabrique des Luddites, a housing project and cultural alternative project dedicated to the meeting of art, crafts, and ecology, installed in a former fabric in the rural Isère region.

A new turn for an emblematic venue
With Céline Kopp as its new director, Magasin CNAC will keep a radical sense of institution building and changing, and reflect the world we live in. It will position itself as an institution that can be artist centred, audience responsive, site specific, and connected internationally.  Opened in 1986, in a 1900 Eiffel building rehabilitated by architect Patrick Bouchain, Magasin CNAC counted amongst the earliest initiatives to decentralise the visual arts landscape in France and is internationally known as the home of the first ever curatorial programme conceived in 1987. This emblematic institution has hosted monumental installations and major exhibitions, showcasing worldwide renown artists such as John Baldessari, Robert Barry, Ericka Beckman, Monica Bonvicini, Daniel Buren, Sylvie Fleury, Liam Gillick & Philippe Parreno, Mike Kelley, Sol LeWitt, Matt Mullican, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Lawrence Weiner, alongside emerging talents.

A study has been launched this autumn 2022 in collaboration with Anna Colin as a first step in the renewing of the École du Magasin in order to respond to the pressing challenges of our time such as decompartmentalising, decarbonising, and decentralising cultural institutions and professional practices, cultivating civic engagement and engaging further in the field of ecological justice.