A Barbarian in Paris is an exhibition departing from the manifesto Active Art, written by Latvian collector, writer and doctor Andrejs Kurcijs in 1923
“For 20 years, the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard Prize has been supporting and helping build the French art scene in its structures, hierarchies, methods and forms. Year after year, it legitimizes the practices of artists, curators and institutions, while establishing melodic contrasts when it invites artists to do curation and curators to do art.
For the past years, Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni have been working on a protean opus recounting in reverse a history of technology. This exhibition takes shape at the crossroads between the three cycles of works that compose it, reflecting on the recently completed first season The Unmanned, a history of computation in eight films, and prefiguring the trajectories of further seasons, which research notions and narratives of value and negativity.
A new cycle of works titled The Everted Capital debuts here with a thermal camera film and a daily performance that interrogate different modes of accumulation, the reciprocal consolidation between what is held to be valuable and invaluable at different historical junctures. Another new project, The Form of Not is introduced through a sculptural installation, which draws equally on algorithmic calculus and anthropological diagrams to compute the form of the ‘first blade’, around whose action the inaugural event of a ‘first cut’ would have taken place.
Value and negativity, transformation and recursion also underpin The Outlawed, only episode of The Unmanned presented at Fondation d’entreprise Ricard. The film centers on the last part of Alan Turing’s life, enduring an enforced hormonal treatment and undertaking morphological explorations in Greece. It visualizes ‘the cut’ as the negative, reversed form through which politics and bodies, biographies and abstractions, natural and technological becomings both maintain a semblance of separation and are agonically hybridized.
Tarik Kiswanson’s artistic practice—which encompasses sculpture, performance, and poetry— evinces an engagement with the poetics of métissage: a means of writing and surviving between multiple conditions and contexts.
Toute la distance de la mer, pour que les filaments à huile des mancenilliers nous arrêtent les battements de cœur. – La pluie a rendu cela possible (…)
At first sight, Maurice Blaussyld and Samuel Richardot are such different artists that it is hard to understand what unites them. Let us say straight off: they both have a relationship with silence.