The body goes on strike

Babi Badalov, Amie Barouh, Florian Fouché, Hedwig Houben
Curated by: Émilie Renard
From May 20 to July 24, 2021
Opening: May 20, from 4pm to 8pm

Florian Fouché, Spoted object?, The Janmari Manifesto, all the pieces of a plate, glue
22 x 16 x 3 cm, 2020. With the support of the Centre natio­nal des arts plas­ti­ques.

As a mutant virus clings to the pulmonary alveoli and slips unnoticed towards unknown mucus membranes, forcing bodies to keep a distance from one another, and as the State divides and separates us out according to obscure sanitary logics, a biological force reveals weaknesses, dependencies, and infinite reserves of patience. The ambient catastrophe of Covid forms the backdrop to this exhibition, which has taken shape over a painfully long year during which culture has been relegated to the regime of the non-essential.

This exhibition, the first in Émilie Renard’s programme at Bétonsalon, brings together works by four artists that centre on the experiences of bodies that are weakened, hindered, marginalized, or overexposed: a solitary body gathering proofs of its legitimate existence for a bureaucratic administration (Babi Badalov); an ambiguous character, Body, who settles into a comfortable sofa and a world of idiosyncratic pleasures, who retakes control of wandering thoughts and alternates between free association and concentration (Hedwig Houben); bodies that pivot around a tipping point between assisting and assisted (Florian Fouché); the bodies of lovers and friends animated by the presence of an unflinching videocamera that captures, moves and separates them (Amie Barouh). This exhibition proposes to observe the unexplored, devalued and dormant forms of experiential knowledge that fatigue, weariness, and exhaustion might yet disclose. Bringing together representations of bodies that are described, perceived or identified as vulnerable, it looks to amplify the faint signals of their power.

The title of this exhibition is inspired by a fable by La Fontaine, Les Membres et l’Estomac [King Gaster and the Members], first published in 1668. In the story, the hands, the legs, and the feet have grown tired of working. They meet, discuss their shared condition, and decide to simply stop feeding the stomach. The fable describes a dissociated body, caught in a class conflict between the worker-limbs and the internal organs ruled over by the stomach, King Gaster, whose governance and administrative and political functions soon turn out to be vital for the ‘kingdom’ of the body as a whole. The political turmoil and the health crisis that ensues are brought to a close when the striking limbs are reminded of their reciprocal engagements and the body becomes fully operational once more.

The body goes on strike sets out the hypothesis of a mobilized and engaged body deliberately disloyal to its rational and biological functions. In this, the exhibition’s title operates as a narrative fiction that precedes the experience of the works, gestures, words and texts of which it is composed, and opens up a space of speculation around a body struggling to free itself from the centrality of the stomach and the verticality of the head, a body uncoupled from its functionalism and open to the anthropolymorphous anatomies mutating within it.

Babi Badalov, Bureaucratic Diaries, 2010-2014, FNAC 2020-0350 (1 to 13), Centre national des arts plastiques ©Babi Badalov / Cnap / Photo : Fabrice Lindor

Amie Barouh, I can change but not 100%, 2019, colour video, 40’24, Amok Films production

Florian Fouché during his residency at Bétonsalon, April 2021

Hedwig Houben, Phewzlopffffffff, 2019, video, 19’, collection Frac Île-de-France