Prologue to a fiction of a space that does not yet exist

Julie Béna (b.1982, France) works on environments that draw inspiration from the world of literature, film, theater and popular culture. Her works deal with the threshold between one perception and another; between being a player or a spoilsport, participation or abstinence. Béna studied at the Villa Arson in Nice and attended the Gerrit Rietveld Academie ad Amsterdam.

Selected solo exhibitions include: Nail Tang, Galerie Joseph Tang (2015-Upcoming); Destiny, Galerie Edouard Manet, Gennevilliers (2015); T&T consortium, you’re already elsewhere, FIAF, New York (2014); The Song of the hands, 100% Transparent, New-York (2013) and Das Reisebüro, Display art projects, Paris (2012). Selected collective exhibitions include: Rideaux / blinds, IAC, Villeurbanne, (2015), Late capitalism, it’s like, almost over, The Luminary, St Louis, Missouri (2014); Things, Design Cloud, Chicago, (2014); La Méthode Jacobson, Nouvelles vagues, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013) and Oracular Vernacular, MAMO, Marseille (2013).

She realized performance projects at Lives Works, Centrale Fies (2014), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2014), PERFORMA In 100% Transparent, New-York (2013) La Fondation Ricard, Paris (2012) and La Fonderie Darling, Montréal (2011) where she presented the first act of the long-term project Have you seen Pantopon Rose? which continued at Fahrenheit, Los Angeles (2014). In 2012-2013 she was part of le Pavillon, the research laboratory of le Palais de Tokyo.

Marie-Michelle Deschamps (b. 1980) lives and works in Montreal and Zürich. Form in her work alternates between abstraction and figuration, examining how objects, images of objects, words, and signs are situated in a web of meaning. Due to the methods used to produce the work—folding, cropping, cutting, juxtaposing, fragmenting, and de-contextualizing—the signification of the represented forms and gestures often remains elusive and ambiguous. Language, which underlies most of her work, is frequently subject to a process of deconstruction. Words are used as spaces to collapse, conceal, or inhabit.

In 2012-2013, Deschamps wrote The Twofold Room / La chambre double, a book that explores the experience of language through the metaphor of the hotel. The text takes the reader on a journey along a horizontal line that begins with the red carpet, breaks at the reception desk, deploys itself endlessly in the hallway, and folds at the bedroom, where another suddenly appears—as it is, evidently, a double room. This artist book has become a framework for the artist’s practice, all individual works being, in a way, the artefacts of the hotel.

In 2012, she graduated with an MA from the Glasgow School of Art. Recent solo and two person exhibitions include and on this no more than, Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zürich (2014); Don’t trip over the wire..!, Collective, as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival (2014); Routine Investigations (with Justin Stephens), CCA Glasgow (2013) and Standard (with Ditte Gantriis), David Dale Gallery, Glasgow (2013). She has participated in group exhibitions at Battat Contemporary, Montreal (2014); Galeria Editioni Periferia, Lucern, Switzerland; Tramway, Glasgow (2013); BQ, Berlin (2013); Espace Saint-Valentin, Lausanne, (2013); Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2012), amongst others. In 2015, Deschamps will be part of group presentations at the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City and at the Northern Galleries of Contemporary Art, Sunderland, UK. She will also host a series of workshops on the works of American writer Louis Wolfson, a project she started on residency at Studio Voltaire, London (2013) and at Triangle France, Marseille (2014).

Beatrice Gibson (b.1978) is an artist and filmmaker based in London. Investigating the utterances that form people and place, Gibson’s practice explores voice, speech, collective production and the problems of their representation. Employing the score as a paradigm for their production, Gibson’s film scripts are developed through open-ended compositional structures, that are, to varying degrees, given over to a collective apparatus. Subsequent material is then edited into a form of notation to be restaged. The resulting films, meticulous and formal portraits of existing landscapes and the voices that inhabit them, work to complicate notion of document.

Recent solo exhibitions include, F for Fibonnacci, Laura Bartlett Gallery, London (2014); A Tale of Two Cities, The Highline, New York, (2014); Beatrice Gibson, Wilfried Lenz, (2014); CAC Bretigny (2013); Index, The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm; The Showroom, London (2012); Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart (2010); The Serpentine Gallery (Sackler Center) (2010). Gibson’s films have screened at numerous experimental film venues and film festivals nationally and internationally including Light Industry, NY, Anthology Film Archives NY; LA Film Forum; Rotterdam International Film Festival; Experimenta, London Film Festival; and Oberhausen Short Film Festival. Gibson’s work was recently included in Assembly, A Recent Survey of Artist’s Film and Video in Britain, 2008-2013, Tate Britain, 2014. She has twice won the Rotterdam International Film Festival Tiger Award for short film, was nominated for the 2013 Jarman Award and shortlisted for the 2013-15 Max Mara Art Prize for Women. In 2014, Gibson was one of four shortlisted artists for the newly inaugurated 2014 Milton Keynes City Prize for the Visual Arts.

Forthcoming solo presentations include Statements, Art Basel, Basel (2015); Collective Gallery Edinburgh (2015) and Grazer Kunstverein (2016).

The Portuguese artists João Maria Gusmão (Lisbon, 1979) and Pedro Paiva (Lisbon, 1978) have collaborated since 2001 on creating objects, installations, and 16 mm and 35 mm short films. The duo describe their overall project as a kind of “recreational metaphysics”, a genre that to a certain extent they themselves have re-invented following the Portuguese poet Alberto Caeiro (Fernando Pessoa) on his layered aesthetical experiment on materialism. The short films depict staged episodes in a series of pseudo-scientific experiments with both poetical and comical consequences. A key element in Gusmão and Paiva’s art is their fascination for what eludes our understanding and undermines the rational.

In recent years Gusmão and Paiva’s production has centred more on the idea of movement as a phenomenon, both within the cinematographic vocabulary, with references to amongst others Edward Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, and through the artists’ own practical experiments with movement in the pictorial plane.

They have participated in several international biennales, during 2006, at the 27th São Paulo Biennale (Brazil); in 2007, at the 6th Mercosul Biennale, Porto Alegre (Brazil); in 2008, at Manifesta 7 (Italy); in 2009 they represented Portugal in the 53rd Venice Biennale; in 2010 the 8th Gwangju Biennale (South Korea). From the several solo show they have done so far we can stand out the following ones from recent years: in 2015, “Papagaio”, co-curated by Vicente Todoli, at Camden Art Center, in London, UK; in 2014, “Papagaio”, curated by Vicente Todoli, at HangarBicocca, in Milan, Italy; in 2013, “Third man argument” at Sies + Hoke Gallery in Dusseldorf, Germany; in 2012, « Those animals, that, at a distance, resemble flies’, Kunsthaus Glarus in Switzerland; in 2011, “Alien Theory”, at Frac Île-de-France, Le Plateau (Paris), “There’s nothing more to tell because this is small, as is every fecundation “, at Museo Marino Marini (Florence) and “Tem gwef tem gwef dr rr rr” at Kunsthalle Dusseldorf; in 2010, “On the Movement of the Fried Egg and Other Astronomical Bodies”, at Ikon Gallery (Birmingham); in 2008, “Horizonte de Acontecimientos” in Photoespanha (Madrid); and, at last, the exhibition “Abissologia: para uma ciência transitória do indiscernível”, in the Cordoaria Nacional, a partnership between ZDB and City Council, in Lisbon.

François Lancien Guilberteau was born in Brest, France in 1985. His photographic installation work relies on a method based on the observation of his own consumption of images. The “consumer / producer schizophrenia” he is suffering from (a disease he diagnosed himself with) led him to produce some works, such as Portrait of the curator as a Geisha, or self-portrait.jpg, that seem to deal with “a gaze that constructs what he is observing”, “a multiple and fragmented self”, and “a desire to possess and manipulate”, as François Aubart wrote in an article about the artist’s exhibition Ce que je crus voir cette nuit là sous l’ironique lune jaune (What I think I saw that night under the ironic yellow moon). He was in residency at Pougues-Les-Eaux, Centre d’Art du Parc St. Léger (2013) and at De Ateliers (2010-2012) in Amsterdam.

Recent projects include: 2015: L’appropriationniste (contre et avec), Villa du parc, Annemasse; 2014: La vie domestique au Parc St. Léger, Pougues-Les-Eaux; Toute la forêt, apes&catles, Bruxelles; 2013: Ce que je crus voir cette nuit là sous l’ironique lune jaune, Ecole d’arts de Cholet, Tripode (Rezé); Portrait de la commissaire d’exposition en Geisha, Mosquito Coast Factory, Nantes; On ne connaît les chiffres que d’un côté du plan, Art 3, Valence; Galerie Filles du calvaire, Paris; Profonde Surface, Shanaynay, Paris.

Having abandoned his studies in science, Alexandre Léger (b. 1977) went on to enrol at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, graduating in 2003. The main inspiration behind his work is found in his daily surroundings, expressed in the form of series, predominantly via the medium of drawing, but also using various techniques – records painted on canvas, collections of Coke cans drawn and painted on paper, fetishes sculpted from wood and drawn, pencil drawings of prescriptions. His work is also informed by his passion for poetry.

Over the last two years, Leger has produced several series that each include both text and drawing, and in which the text is as important as the drawing that it accompanies,: Ciel Rose (2013) and Venise Bleue (2014). Since 2004, Léger has regularly exhibited in Paris, Sarajevo and The Netherlands and has contributed to The Drawing Journal, Roven. He is represented by the Galerie Bernard Jordan, Paris and Zurich. Léger lives and works in Paris.

Recent projects include: Rituels, curated by Raven, MRAC Sérignan, TUSSENBEELDEN, group show curated by Paul Van Der Eerden, Museum Schunk*, Heerlen, The Netherlands; Ken YEUNG/ Alexandre LEGER, MACC de Fresnes, Maison d’Art Contemporain Chaillioux, Fresnes; DrawingNow, Salon du dessin contemporain, Focus-Galerie Bernard Jordan, Carreau du Temple, Paris; 3 Days in Paris/Dessins, group show, Galerie Bernard Jordan, Paris; Collection 10m2, a Pierre Courtin project, group show, Centre Bang, Chicoutimi, Canada; RE: exposition de dessins, group show curated by Géraldine Pastor Lloret, Institut Supérieur des Beaux-Arts de Besançon.

Diego Marcon was born in Busto Arsizio (Varese) in 1985. His research focuses on video and moving images, taking a documentary approach. The starting point of his work is reality; through a process of audio-visual recording, it is edited and re-written into a film structure. The moving image is a powerful tool to scratch the surface of reality and unfold some of its invisible dimension – where the strains that flow across spaces, objects and images are caught into dispositifs of feeling and desire. There is a progressive effort to deny the image itself, an attempt to empty a space in order to let this dimension surface and present itself. From this emptiness, he recently introduced fictional elements in his practice.

Diego Marcon graduated in film editing at the Scuola Civica di Cinema, Televisione e Nuovi Media di Milano in 2006. In 2012 he received his BA in Visual Arts at the IUAV University of Venice. In 2009 he participated in the Advanced Course in Visual Arts of the Fondazione Antonio Ratti and took part in the residency program of the Dena Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris. In 2010 he was a studio recipient at the Fondazione Bevilaqua La Masa in Venice. In 2013 he was artist in residence at Centre international d’art et du paysage in Vassivière and participated in a residency program of the Institut Français at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. His works have been screened in film festivals both in Italy and abroad, and have been show internationally: at the Whitechapel Gallery (London, UK), Fondation d’entreprise Ricard (Paris, France), De Vleeshal (Middelburg, The Netherlands), NAi – National Architecture Institute (Rotterdam, The Netherlands), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Torino, Italy), MAGA Musea Arte Gallarate (Gallarate, Italy), Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa (Venezia, Italy), Peep-Hole and Gasconade (Milano, Italy).

Julien Tiberi (b. 1979, Marseille) reflects on the apparatus of the exhibition, from historiography to the perceptual conditions, entwining drawing, sculpture, painting and installation. His work was featured in solo and group exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2011), Galerie Francesca Pia, Zürich, Pompidou Center, Paris, Galerie Semiose (2012), La Centrale, Brussels (2013). He worked recently on the exhibition Sir Thomas Trope in collaboration with Aurélien Mole, a scenography of walls in motion generating a multiplicity of viewpoints and interactions between their respective works (L’histoire de l’Oeil, Marseille, 2012; Contemporary art center of La Villa du Parc, Annemasse, Fiac, Paris, 2013). In his last solo in 2014 at galerie Semiose, he challenged his earlier methodology with a focus on documentation towards more unpredictable forms.

France Valliccioni (b. 1968) is a French visual artist born in Flers de l’Orne (France) a city known for its park, its castle and its pound, all in the same and central place also ranked near the top among the list of cities destroyed during World War II if nothing else. Her work involves sculpture, installation-art, painting, photography, sound and texts. It mostly combines second hand material, objects and painting into various assemblages with literary concerns.

She studied Visual Arts and Linguistics at Rennes II University, then Philosophy and Aesthetics at Panthéon-Sorbonne University.She currently lives and works in Paris.

Recent projects include: Beyond the houseplant, Glassbox, Paris (2014); The coming exhibition, Les Salaisons, Romainville (2014) ; Eat The Blue – Jagna Ciuchta, Le 116, Montreuil (2013) ; Collage ou l’âge de la colle, Galerie Eva Meyer, Paris (2013) ; Mnemosyne – Anywhere & galerie Bertrand Grimont, Paris (2013).

During the past years Adva Zakai has been exploring various performance formats where she has acted as a choreographer, a performer or a curator. Her choreographic works explore often how body and language are perceived through each other, and evoke an experience that can be grasped through multiple perspectives. Her work is presented in theatres, museums, galleries and apartments. During 2010, she obtained an artistic research grant, in the framework of the post master program a.pass in Antwerp, in which she researched the influence of a curatorial approach on the development of new performance formats. She pursued dance education in Israel followed by studies at the Mime School, Amsterdam (2000-2002). Her practice involves collaborations with other artists on participative projects, conferences and festivals. She is teaching performance practice in art academy Kask in Gent, Belgium, as well as leading workshops in art and dance academies.

Barbara Sirieix (b. 1983) is a writer and independent curator based in Paris. She was co-founder and co-director of Redshoes from 2008 to 2012; she curated film programs for various venues (Cinematheque of Tangiers, LOOP Barcelona, Souvenirs from Earth, FIDMarseille). In 2011, she organized Channel with Josefine Wikström between Paris (Treize) and London (Depford X Festival, The Old Police Station, Chisenhale Gallery) and collaborated with Ismaïl Bahri on Working for Change, Project for a Moroccan pavillon at the 54th Venice Biennale curated by Abdellah Karroum. She contributed to various publications and magazines (South as a State of Mind, Sarai Reader, Journal de la Triennale, Vdrome, La belle revue, art-agenda). Her recent projects involve process-based constructions, fictional and poetic writing (I’ve lost my marbles, Tòtal Project Space, Athens; La référence d’objet n’est pas définie à une instance d’objet, Galerie Edouard Manet, Gennevilliers). She will be in residency this summer at La Galerie, contemporary art centre of Noisy-le-Sec, to write a fiction in the context of an exhibition project at ODD in Bucharest in April-May and Schleifmühlgasse 12-14 in Vienna in December.