The Half of Things

View of the exhibition "The Half of Things" - second part, Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, 2010. Image: Aurélien Mole

Simon Fravega, Chloé Quenum, Jean-Charles de Quillacq, Clément Rodzielski, Benjamin Seror

A propo­si­tion by : Mélanie Bouteloup & Nicolas Fourgeaud

Three open­ings from 6pm to 9pm :
Tuesday 2th march
Tuesday 13th april
Tuesday 25th may

View of the exhibition "The Half of Things" - third part, Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, 2010. Image: Aurélien Mole

The Half of Things is a pro­ject that brings together five artists in three suc­ces­sive exhi­bi­tions, accom­pa­nied by two pub­li­ca­tions. In this series of exhi­bi­tions, Betonsalon will serve both as a place of work and an exhi­bi­tion space: the invited artists will have the options of working there from day to day or of working at a dis­tance, and playing with the pos­si­bil­i­ties of a dis­play that con­tin­u­ously evolves or of proposing deeply con­sid­ered one-off per­for­mances. The exhi­bi­tion will provide an oppor­tu­nity for them to test some fragile aspects of their prac­tices over a lim­ited period or to go deeper with works in pro­gress. The two pub­li­ca­tions will include inter­views, artists’ writ­ings, crit­ical texts (lit­erary or aca­demic), scripts and more. The Half of Things offers the pos­si­bility
of a deep and crit­ical encounter with the works of sev­eral artists of the same gen­er­a­tion.

To varying degrees, the artists par­tic­i­pating in this pro­ject share an approach that con­ceives of the exhi­bi­tion as a piv­otal site for the real­iza­tion of the work. Each propo­si­tion can either make its pro­cess acces­sible or hide it; it can pro­pose rei­fied objects or, on the con­trary, focus on the per­for­ma­tive aspects of the artist’s prac­tice. Each propo­si­tion will fur­ther­more have the oppor­tu­nity to empha­size one aspect or another, according to the paths taken by the pro­jects and the artists’ shifting per­spec­tives over the course of the exhi­bi­tion. Confronting such prac­tices, it is dif­fi­cult to limit the work to a phys­ical object or cir­cum­scribe it in an empir­ical way. Identifying the work becomes com­plex because it cannot be reduced to a thing that is simply
pre­sent in the here and now: the ges­tures and actions that pre­ceded the dis­play of objects or the cre­ation of a per­for­mance, the announce­ment of events still to come, and even the pro­duc­tion of doc­u­men­ta­tion become deci­sive ele­ments in artic­u­lating the meaning of the work. The Half of Things will shed light on prac­tices that explore how
the long-time dura­tion of the exhi­bi­tion and the gen­er­a­tive pro­cess deter­mine the def­i­ni­tion of a work, be it an object or a per­for­mance. The exhi­bi­tion space, with all its limits, will, more or less, provide us with an account of those pro­cesses. Or of the ways in which an object can slip from being an object into being an event, and vice-versa, without anyone noticing…

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