One caption hides another

Agency, Daniel Boyd, Peggy Buth, Jimmie Durham, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Camille Henrot, Patrizio di Massimo, Uriel Orlow, Francis Upritchard, Françoise Vergès (Maison des Civilisations et de l’Unité Réunionnaise), Susan Vogel.

View of the exhibition "One caption hides another". Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, 2011-2012. Image: Aurélien Mole.

"When men die, they enter his­tory. When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call cul­ture."
Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, Statues also die (1953)

One cap­tion hides another aims to expand the field coun­tering offi­cial his­tory by taking as a depar­ture point a key topic in cur­rent muse­o­log­ical debates, that of anthro­po­log­ical resti­tu­tion. Inspired by the recent repa­tri­a­tion of the Maori war­rior head from the Museum of Rouen to its ances­tral home, New Zealand, this exhi­bi­tion and series of events pro­pose an explo­ration into the eth­ical, sci­en­tific, polit­ical and legal issues arising from cases of resti­tu­tion.

One cap­tion hides another fur­ther aims to prob­lema­tise the dis­place­ment between tra­di­tional and cult object, on the one hand, and his­tor­ical and muse­o­log­ical object, on the other. Can an object have dif­ferent sta­tuses? Who can legit­i­mately make this deci­sion? Are there dif­ferent pos­sible nar­ra­tives to under­stand and read these objects? A crit­ical decon­struc­tion of these ques­tions will make vis­ible and leg­ible the fact that a cap­tion on an exhi­bi­tion label often hides another beneath it.

Addressing the topics of col­lec­tive memory and her­itage, One cap­tion hides another cre­ates a meeting point for art­works, ethno­graphic and juridical doc­u­ments, films and museo­graphic pro­jects. Documenting real sit­u­a­tions, making use of fic­tion or rad­i­cal­ising one’s rela­tion to her­itage, the artists, researchers and plat­forms invited in this pro­ject are all engaged in reflexive endeav­ours con­cerning the muse­o­log­ical object and chal­lenging ethno­graphic rep­re­sen­ta­tion.

Curated by Mélanie Bouteloup and Anna Colin.

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View of the exhibition "One caption hides another" with Camille Henrot, Objets Augmentés (detail), 2010. Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, 2011-2012. Image: Aurélien Mole. Courtesy Camille Henrot & kamel mennour gallery