Vision Forum in Beirut with 98weeks and Assabil Libraries

the VOLUME project, September 11–20, 2014, Beirut.

Have libraries become obsolete in the digital age? Can we conceive public libraries as something other than a collection of books? When does a library begin and end?

Started as a long-term research project in November 2013, the VOLUME project investigates the potential of libraries as sites for artistic creation and production of knowledge, as well as for the formation of critique and dialogue. For nine days, international and local artists, theorists, curators and librarians will engage the public library as a space and a concept, through a series of performances, ad-hoc interventions, talks, literary writings and installations. Events will take place at 98weeks Project Space, Assabil Libraries, and in public spaces around Beirut.

Pauline Curnier Jardin at MIT List Visual Center

Working in drawing, performance, music, installation, and film, Pauline Curnier Jardin (b. 1980, Pertuis, France) crafts fictional adventures full of chance occurrences and wonders that nonetheless carry with them the potential for mishap or misfortune. Through lighting, color, texture, costume, soundtrack, and props, she creates transgressive, funny, and highly stylized visual settings that owe more to theater than to conventional narrative cinema. Curnier Jardin’s stories reveal a fascination with monsters, decorative objects, and animals, although her work expresses a particular awareness of the roles women have played in mythology, folklore, and conventional narrative cinema, roles that are commonly stereotyped as saint, witch, mother, or mystic.



Curnier Jardin supports a generous, intelligent, non-systematic vision of continuity between human and nonhuman bodies—humans consume dirt, cave walls dance, a pear is covered with hair.  While humans take on animal qualities, things take on human traits, such as love and longing. Usually associated with femininity and passivity, she looks to passion—traditionally opposed to “masculine” reason—as primary to sensations, perceptions, and the subject’s—or object’s—potential for action. More broadly, her work confounds the logic that divides human and nonhuman, rationality and emotion, sacred and profane, ally and enemy, masculine and feminine, showing instead how each is capable of interacting and combining. 
 


Dont Miss Grotta Profunda in London

If You have not seen Pauline Curnier-Jardin's master piece Grotta Profunda you will soon have the opportunity to do so in London as part of the exhibition "Once upon a time there were two knights" at Nettie Horn. Other artists participating Julie Béna, Hippolyte Hentgen, Invernomuto.

This is what 

curator by Barbara Sirieix writes: The exhibition brings together works that relate to mythologies within a frame of expanded practices. From Ancient and Modern references, the artists reshape new figures of fascination and wonder as storytellers: jigsaw knights, the Venus of W, The Mermaid-monkey or the mysterious B.O.B. They lean towards performativity within composite media displays - film, sculpture, tapestry, photographs - challenging the cinema apparatus as well as experimenting with media synthesis and collages of disparate fragments of vision.



Narrativity seems to be generalized as normative to define the ordinary human experience and used as a weapon of mass distraction. In the context of the "narrative" where marketing agencies and political strategists worship the power of the individual story, the artists formulate their narratives through a kaleidoscopic approach of idiosyncrasy to figure ways to reconsider fantasy. They often work with four hands therefore challenging the potential of originality and their projects expand beyond the exhibition space with trailers, costumes, accessories, drawings or texts as tactics to dismantle linearity.

16 FEBRUARY - 24 MARCH 2013
Preview: Friday 15th February, 6-9pm

NETTIE HORN
17A Riding House Street
London | W1W 7DS
44 (0)207 637 2106