Nos ombres devant nous

NOS OMBRES DEVANT NOUS (our shadows before us) is an exhibition imagined by 12 curators, all MA students of a professional curatorial programme “Art Contemporain et son exposition” (Contemporary art and it’s exhibition).

On the basis of a collaborative partnership between Paris-Sorbonne University and the Beaux-Arts de Paris (School of Fine Arts of Paris), Basalte has selected nine visual artists, 2016 graduates. Our proposal is the outcome of our brainstorming sessions with Claire Le Restif, director of the Contemporary Art Center of Ivry – le Crédac, where we reflected upon what ties the same generation of artists together, and urged us to question our ways of living in the present. Without taking a step back, we ignore if we are living in an era of decline or progress: depending on how one looks at it, we may be at a crossroads.

While the media faces a growing loss of authority and rumors are mutating and becoming viral, it becomes problematic to distinguish between truth and falsehood. The artistic approaches of these nine artists contaminate one another and proliferate on a lack of in-formation: matter forms and deforms, crystallises in open, uncertain and disordered systems. These approaches are traces of contemporary romanticism, relics of a time in progress, monuments in ruins before they were even built.

The rising up from ruins is used as a metaphor of a post-human vision of the world, where people are obliged to reconsider their environment and ways of living. By mentioning “nos ombres devant nous” (Our shadows before us), Yves Bonnefoy invites us to a trip where human beings are evoked only by their figure, balancing between elimination and presence. His poem poses an open question about our relationship with time, the linear and circular evolution of history, mostly in favour of its repetitive and recurrent character. The invited artists set up new myths, with atemporal axes and values. They conceive stratagems and fictions that borrow their forms to popular fables, to archives and chronicles of past centuries and they associate these with modern life. Being witnesses of the present, the artists participate in the construction of new collective memories and invite us to their unprecedented stories.