with Rogi André | Harry Callahan | Arnaud Claass | Marc Deneyer | Robert Doisneau | Trisha Donnelly | Patrick Faigenbaum | Bernard Faucon | Peter Fischli & David Weiss | Michel François | Lee Friedlander | Anne Garde Luigi Ghirri | Jan Groover | Florence Henri | Peter Hujar | Manuel Ismora | Michel Journiac | Benoît Maire | Willy Maywald | Francis Morandini Yan Morvan | Jean-Luc Moulène | Jean-Luc Mylayne | Bernard Plossu August Sander | Émile Savitry | Josef Sudek | Didier Vermeiren | Willy Zielke
Collection FRAC Aquitaine, FRAC artothèque Nouvelle-Aquitaine Limousin, FRAC Poitou-Charentes.
A.M. : Of the many ways of drawing on a collection to create an exhibition, the most obvious is the thematic section, which makes it possible to generate coherent and easily understandable bodies of work. The trouble is that this common denominator often crushes the elements under the weight of its univocity. The theoretical cut, on the other hand, polarises each unit in the direction of the thesis to be demonstrated. The formalist cut, the categorical cut, the aesthetic cut... these are all ways of freezing the abundance of a collection for the duration of an exhibition.
J.C.: As a flâneur, I go out once or twice a month to see exhibitions, but I see a lot less than Aurélien: in addition to his work as an artist and curator, he travels all over France visiting galleries and institutions to create views of exhibitions, so I wouldn't be surprised if he visits twenty or so a week. I often see these images shared on the internet by gallery websites. They follow a strict protocol: try to see the gallery empty, but at the viewer's eye level. The ‘exhibition view’ genre has now become an indispensable element in the archiving and dissemination of artistic events all over the world, and has even had a definite influence on the practices and thinking of contemporary artists. One day I filmed a mediator wearing only a watch presenting an exhibition by Benoît Maire at the VNH gallery, without recording the sound. I pursued this idea in other galleries, with naked spectators and mediators wandering under the neon lights of the white cubes, among the works on display.
A.M.: When I saw this work, I asked myself what photographs from the collections of the FRAC Aquitaine, Limousin and Poitou-Charente we would like to see next to female and male nudes, which could also be manipulated during a hanging? How could nudes parasitise or enrich other images? How, through bodies wearing photographs, can we evoke notions of weight, taste, politics, textures, meaning... How, finally, do bodies come to haunt an exhibition because, even if it is often depicted as empty in its most canonical representations, there are always bodies running through it. There are the bodies of those who hang exhibitions and there are the bodies of those who visit them. An exhibition, in the classical sense of the term, is ultimately the relationship between a body and a work of art in a space.