Beyond Screens

Whether he is dealing with issues to do with jobs, forms of violence, forecasts or finance…
it would seem that Julien Prévieux never fails to pose himself the question
about how an artist can work with tools of manipulation and control in order to
reveal cracks and the possible aesthetic dimension.  To help us better see and better understand these curious objects of thinking, he makes use of very diverse forms, from the literary object (the Lettres de non-motivation/Letters of Non-Application) to the handmade pullover (D’octobre à février) and film (Anomalies construites).  “What Shall We Do Next?”, a film and performance which earned the artist the 2014 Marcel Duchamp prize, combines the gestures of a future imagined by film with those of an historical choreography and those which will be the “true” gestures of tomorrow.  This labour of reduction and editing, and this echo of different forms of creation, produce a strange beauty at the same time, and open up a rather large area of reflection.  Julien Prévieux’s art offers ways of grasping realities which make us either a little frightened or very scared.  We shall be talking about this art and these
realities with Grégoire Chamayou, a philosophy researcher at the CNRS, and
author in particular of Théorie du drone (La Fabrique, 2013), who shares several areas of interest with Julien Prévieux.