For the second year, the Centre national des arts plastiques has launched an international call for projects for the awarding of curatorial grants, with the aim of starting a research programme in relation to the works listed in the inventory of the Fonds national d’art contemporain.
These grants enable curators to try out new strategies and to envision the collection in its more experimental dimension, from its most historic to its most contemporary aspect.
Liberty Adrien, The history of women in the Cnap collection
This curatorial research project consists of rewriting the history of the collection through the prism of the acquisition and public commission of works by female artists.
The status of women in the history of art, which fluctuates according to cultural systems, and the figure of the woman artist, compared with socio-political history, will be at the heart of this research. By attempting to define the obstacles that women artists were faced with, the project aims to discover the impact that the emancipation of women and feminism had on the arts from 1791 to this day.
Liberty Adrien is a curator who lives and works between Paris and Hamburg, where she founded the Âme nue gallery, a space dedicated to contemporary art and, more specifically, to the emerging scene.
Alexandra Fau, The introduction and amplification of life in the Cnap collection
This research on the introduction and amplification of life in the Cnap collection is underpinned by the fetishisation of intensity—an eminently modern notion.
The introduction of life in the Cnap collection serves as a “change of scene," an invitation to reposition the institution as it faces the criticism of the mausoleum-museum implicitly formulated from the 1960s.
Living artworks are strangely torn between their requirement for intensity and their desire for inefficiency. They oscillate between the insignificance of found objects and the preciousness of a treasure. Research on the introduction and amplification of life in the Cnap collection invites us to embrace the wider spectrum of creation.
Alexandra Fau is a freelance curator, art critic, and art history teacher. She has overseen several exhibitions on the relationship between art and architecture, as well as between art and design. The question of narration is also at the heart of each of her projects.
Matthieu Laurette, Portrait(s) of the artist as (an) artist(s) (provisional title)
Portrait(s) de l’artiste en artiste(s) (provisional title) is intended as an exploration of the figure of the artist in the Cnap collection since its beginnings.
Halfway between an artist’s outlook on his peers and (a) collection(s) of portraits aiming to identify the different types of representation of the figure of the artist in a specific collection, this curatorial project will take (the) form “of” and “through” research and immersion in all the collections (historical, modern and contemporary).
With no particular consideration for the mediums used, the proposed body of works will include as many different types of representation as possible, selected from a collection of over 100,000 works and will attempt to identify the different types of representation of the figure of the artist.
Matthieu Laurette is a French artist who works with a variety of mediums to try and explore the relationships between Conceptual art, Pop Art, Institutional Critique, economy and contemporary society.
