Artistes : Laurie Charles • Grégory Chatonsky • Julien Creuzet • Marie Lienhard • Caroline Mesquita • Sara Sadik • Virginie Yassef / Période : août-octobre 2021 / Lieu : Buropolis, Marseille / Commissariat : Jean-Christophe Arcos (direction artistique générale de l’exposition Si nous n’avions pas vu les étoiles : Jean-Baptiste Janisset) / Production : fonds de dotation Katapult
On the occasion of ArtORama 2021, and a few weeks after the opening of Buropolis as a new collective space in Marseille counting no less than 200 artists, Katapult endowment for contemporary art supports Jean-Baptiste Janisset new show.
Based on collaborations and experimentations, Si nous n’avions pas vu les étoiles is the second part of a series of investigations about imaginary stellar journeys, started in May 2021 at Cantina Art Space in Aarhus (Denmark).
The exhibition takes the form of an odyssey, evolving in an atmosphere evoking Andrei Tarkovski’s Solaris. In this sense, every artist would be a member of the spaceship crew, and every artwork would correspond to the function of the artist in the crew.
Within this speculated spaceship, besides the narrative made possible for viewers as they move among the crew, another travel story gushes from outside the window – the screening figures different departures and possible anticipations of loneliness, of failures, of communities, of learning processes.
The videos will be mounted randomly in different cycles, so that the trajectory initiated by the curator can be shattered like magnetic fields and solar winds do to spacecrafts.
Hence, fictional causes can be permuted with imaginary consequences : despite the feeling that an opera is unfolding, the scenario are continuously disrupted and floating.
Following Arendt’s thoughts on space conquest not as much as an attempt to embiggen human dimension but on the contrary as a vain quest for mirroring Earth’s nature, the screening merges what is left behind and what is to be found, and their reassembly generates mythologies of loss.
stillcurating/ 