Events
Friday, 3 May, from 4 pm to 9 pm
Opening of the exhibition at Bétonsalon
Saturday, 4 May, from 6 pm to 10 pm
Opening of the exhibition at Pauline Perplexe
Friday, 17 May, from 3 pm to 6 pm
Béton Book Club: collective reading of The Promise of Happiness, by Sara Ahmed (2010), in English
The Promise of Happiness is a provocative cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: ’I just want you to be happy’, ’I’m happy if you’re happy’. Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the ’happiness duty’, the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which is deemed good, and that by being happy ourselves, we will make others happy. Ahmed maintains that happiness is a promise that directs us toward certain life choices and away from others. Happiness is promised to those willing to live their lives in the right way. Ahmed draws on the intellectual history of happiness, from classical accounts of ethics as the good life, through seventeenth-century writings on affect and the passions, eighteenth-century debates on virtue and education, and nineteenth-century utilitarianism. She engages with feminist, antiracist, and queer critics who have shown how happiness is used to justify social oppression, and how challenging oppression sometimes causes unhappiness. Reading novels and films including Mrs. Dalloway, The Well of Loneliness, Bend It Like Beckham, and Children of Men, Ahmed considers the plight of figures as the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, the angry black woman, and the melancholic migrant. Through her readings, she raises critical questions about the moral order imposed by the injunction to be happy.
Sara Ahmed is a feminist writer and independent scholar. She works at the intersection of feminist, queer and race studies. Her research is concerned with how bodies and worlds take shape; and how power is secured and challenged in everyday life worlds as well as institutional culture
Saturday, 25 May, from 3 pm to 5 pm
Launch of the book La Part affective (Paraguay Press) by Sophie Orlando and conversation with Émilie Renard and Elena Lespes Muñoz
And for parents coming with their children, in parallel, Beep beep!: flipbook workshop, for children aged 5 and over
In La Part affective, Sophie Orlando chronicles the recent transformations in the occupation and life of teachers. Her text talks about the porosities existing today in art schools between legitimate and minority knowledges. It gathers artists’ voices, inner monologues, class notes, student contributions to explain how pedagogical links are forged today, how they are based above all on the circulation of affects. The link between the intimate and the political makes it possible to write a renewed narrative about art.
Sophie Orlando is an author, art historian and researcher, professor in art history and theory at the École Nationale Supérieure, Villa Arson, Nice. She seeks to understand how artistic knowledge is produced and how it is denormalised. She has published numerous articles on identity politics, Black studies and contemporary art in Great Britain (Revue de l’art, Muséologie), and in particular on British Black Art (Critical interventions, Critique d’art). She conducted artist Sonia Boyce’s monography, Thoughtful disobedience (Les Presses du Réel / Villa Arson). She also co-edited an issue of the Cahiers du Mnam titled “Globalisées, mondialisées, contemporaines. Pratiques, productions et écritures de l’art aujourd’hui, 2023”. As a researcher in the AHRC programme “Black artists and Modernism” (2015-2018, UAL, Middlesex University, London), she co-directed with susan pui san lik and curator Nick Aikens the seminar then the digital book Conceptualism: Intersectional Readings, International Framings (Van Abbemuseum, 2019). Since 2019, she has been involved in critical approaches to art education. She runs a digital edition and a book collection, “La surface démange”, about critical, institutional and alternative pedagogies in art.
Saturday, 15 June — as part of Treize’Estival
from 2:30 pm to 4:30 pm: Tape a Nap: scotch painting workshop, for adults
from 5:30 pm to 6:30 pm: tour of the exhibition by Bétonsalon’s team, as part of a ‘RandoTram’ with Tram – réseau art contemporain Paris / Île-de-France
from 5 pm to 7 pm: Launch of the book Mémoire de l’oublieur (Les commissaires anonymes) by Charlie Boisson, cooking and oblea tasting
Share