Practical sessions - Thomas Hirschhorn, Otobong Nkanga, Julien Creuzet
For its fifth edition, the Académie vivante (Living Academy) program invited several artists to collaborate with the laboratory of the Epigenetics and Cell Fate Unit of the Paris Diderot university. Thomas Hirschhorn, Otobong Nkanga and Julien Creuzet have come to meet the students in order to build and cultivate a shared political reflection over a diversity of artistic, poetic, and scientific practices, guided by a fundamental principle of creative freedom.
Sessions 1 & 2 with Thomas Hirschhorn
December 15th and 22nd, 2017, at Paris Diderot university
For the Académie vivante (Living Academy) program, Hirschhorn designed a workshop where students in Genetics made their own collages over two sessions, and critiqued them together. Collages included a mix of selected fashion and science publications, and graphic images of war and violent acts, found on the Internet, used by Hirschhorn in his practice. Students were led to reconsider the production of knowledge, the status of images, and the role of censorship - often self-censorhip - when building meaning from an accumulation of visual cues.
Thomas Hirschhorn (Switzerland, 1957) is a visual artist. He graduated from the Zurich University of the Arts and first worked in graphic design before developing in the 1980’s a series of sculptural works made with raw material and rudimentary collages. He was the first recipient of the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2002. A socially-aware artist, Hirschhorn often centers his works on the unequal social and cultural conditions of the modern world by integrating these tensions in his sculptures and installations, placing instability and precariousness at the heart of his approach. In 2004, he created the Albinet Precarious Museum, a project conceived with Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers that set up an ephemeral museum within a suburban social housing area in the north of Paris. Recently, the artist developed a renewed interest for collage, and the way it orientates the gaze and represents the current “consumption” mode of seeing images. Thomas Hirschhorn lives and works in Aubervilliers (France).
Sessions 3 & 4 with Otobong Nkanga and Maya Tounta
January 26th and February 2nd, 2018, at Cité internationale des arts
Otobong Nkanga and Maya Tounta built on their existing project Carved to Flow, commissioned by documenta 14, to offer students in Genetics a two-part workshop using coal, clay, and soap. Students were led to question the production of value and the origin of goods, connecting the concepts of market value in the economy of the arts and the economy of science.
Otobong Nkanga (b. Nigeria, 1974) is a visual and performance artist. After studying in her native country as well as in Paris and Amsterdam, she developed a cross-disciplinary artistic practice, exploring through several media (photography, painting, tapestry, performance, video, sculpture) the ties between identity, displacement and natural resources. At documenta 14 in 2017, Otobong Nkanga was commissioned a project in Kassel and Athens titled Carved to Flow, encompassing performance, installation and enterprise by the production and sale of biological soap. Her work was also featured in the Berlin, Lyon, São Paulo, Sharjah and Sydney Biennials, and entered the collections of the Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou (Paris) and Tate Modern (London), among others. Otobong Nkanga lives and works in Antwerp (Belgium).
Maya Tounta (b. Greece, 1990) is a writer, curator and artist. She holds an MA in Art History and Philosophy from the University of St Andrews (Glasgow, UK), and has been involved in various projects in close collaboration with several artists, namely at RUPERT in Vilnius where she worked as Curator. Recently, she worked with artist Otobong Nkanga towards the realization of the work Carved to Flow at documenta 14 on a series of programs about the practices guiding the production, circulation and consumption of resources in art and society. Following this project, she collaborated again with Nkanga on a participatory ceramics workshop in the context of the event We are not the number we think we are at Cité internationale des arts in Paris in February 2018. Maya Tounta lives and works in Athens (Greece) and Vilnius (Lithuania).
Sessions 5 & 6 with Julien Creuzet
February 9th and 23rd, 2018, at Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, as part of the exhibition Julien Creuzet: La pluie a rendu cela possible depuis le morne en colère, la montagne est restée silencieuse. Des impacts de la guerre, des gouttes missile. Après tout cela, peut-être que le volcan protestera à son tour. – Toute la distance de la mer (…)
Artist Julien Creuzet led the Académie vivante students to talk about their personal experiences, as part of his exhibition at Bétonsalon. Building on Creuzet’s writing practice, students performed poems in the exhibition space, reflecting on personal dilemmas, matters of professional development, and their motivations for choosing the career path of genetics.
Julien Creuzet (b. France, 1986) is a visual artist and a poet. He graduated from the Lyon Academy of Fine Arts and Le Fresnoy. In 2017, Julien Creuzet was a resident artist at the Méthode Room program in Chicago (USA). After a two-part exhibition at the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard and Bétonsalon – Center for Art and Research in 2018, his projects took him to collaborate with Lafayette Anticipations and the Palais de Tokyo for the Rencontres d’Arles festival. His installations and sculptures are conceived in resonance with his poetic work, which is inspired by migration and identity narratives stemming from the artist’s own diasporic experience. Julien Creuzet lives and works in Fontenay-sous-Bois (France).
The Académie vivante program is supported by the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation.
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