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Cultural programming - Exhibition curatorship

Exhibition curator, Sixtine Dubly, Claire Jacquet

 

Narcissus or the flowering of worlds

FRAC Nouvelle-Aquitaine, MÉCA, Bordeaux

December 7, 2019 - August 22, 2020

 

From silent to powerful, the exhibition presents the artistic avenues of reflection linked to the Flower (sic. the flowering plant), which deal with ecological, scientific, economic and societal questions, emphasizing the links between the feminine and the political. Abandoning the ornamental aspect of flowers in art, the curators investigate the blossoming of a flower that is no longer an object but a subject. It is spread across 12 exploratory rooms (Being a flower,  A flower of one's own, The floral black, The revolt of the hydrangeas, Politics of metamorphosis, etc.). The provocative title of Narcissus plays on the current ambiguity of ecological, even technological, blindness and its anthropic vertigo. Recurrent in the history of art, the mythological figure of Narcissus is treated by artists as a means of knowing oneself and the world, a desire for metamorphosis. Narcissus is also the flower heralding spring.

 

Artists : Bas Jan Ader, François Aloujès, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Maya Andersson, Xavier Antin, Nobuyoshi Araki, Yto Barrada, Hicham Berrada, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Delphine Chanet, David Claerbout, Armand Clavaud, Serge Comte, Jules Elie Delaunay, Florence Doléac, Charles Fréger, Hieronymus Galle, Jef Geys, John Giorno, Sophie Grandval, Camille Henrot, Suzanne Husky, Pierre Joseph, Kapwani Kiwanga, Majida Khattari, Jeff Koons, Suzanne Lafont, Marianne Loir, Mark Lewis, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ernest T., Mathieu Mercier, Joachim Mogarra, Pierre Molinier, Jean-Luc Moulène, Patrick Neu, Pierre et Gilles, Elodie Pong, Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa, Man Ray, Martial Raysse, Marc Riboud, Hugues Reip, Lionel Scoccimaro, Alain Séchas, Shimabuku, Josef Sudek, Suzanne Treister, Thu-Van Tran, Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille, Jacques Vieille, Jehan Georges Vibert, Herman de Vries, Lois Weinberger, Philip Wiegard, Amy Yao.

For this exhibition of unpublished works by Hicham Berrada, Delphine Chanet, Suzanne Lafont, Suzanne Husky, Elodie Pong benefited from production support from the Frac Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA.

 

Read :

Exhibition press kit in english

What do flowers dream of? conversation between Sixtine Dubly and Claire Jacquet, catalogue, ed. Actes Sud, 2019, 136p

 

Press :

In Bordeaux, flowers have power, Emmanuelle Lequeux, Le Monde, 01/16/2020

In Bordeaux, the finest of art, Stéphane Renault, The Art Newspaper Daily, 01/29/2020

The new language of flowers, Jean Christophe Castelain, Le Journal

Arts, Feb-Mar 2020

The symbolism of flowers, Aude de Bourbon, Transfuge, January 2020

The finest flower of contemporary art, Letizia Dannery, L'Express, 01/12/2020

The flowers of the male, Emmanuelle Lequeux, Beaux-Arts magazine, February 2020 Silence, it’s growing, France 5, Marie-Ange Morges, 09/25/2020

Art and nature, Anne-Cécile Sanchez, L'Oeil, November 2019

 

Opposite from top to bottom, from left to right. Suzanne Husky. Kapwani Kiwanga. Majida Khattari, Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa, Suzanne Husky, Marc Riboud. Shimabuku, Hicham Berrada, Suzanne Husky, John Giorno. Exhibition poster, Fanette Mellier. Exhibition tour by room. Photo. André Morin.

Introductory text of the exhibition

 

The growing presence of flowers in contemporary art signals the profound revival of a subject most often considered ornamental. The flower is a powerful matrix that makes up three-quarters of plant biodiversity. It has revolutionized the earth, produced air, fruit, medicine, and color. It is this necessary, essential link that artists interpret and reinvest today. And first of all, what is a flower? An ambivalent entity, between strength and fragility, intimacy and society. It is the sex of the ephemeral and matrix plant. It is a predation issue by political nature. The exhibition Narcissus or the flowering of worlds, which brings together around a hundred works (video, installation, painting, drawing, photography, sculpture), questions the hierarchy of artistic genres and the making of industrial life. It highlights the new sources of inspiration that are the ecofeminist movement or recent approaches to philosophy and science. Whether through morphogenesis, the Flower Being or wild thought, artists multiply the points of friction with this still largely unknown flower, of which only a fifth has been the subject of research. From then on, Narcissus is not so much the egocentric hero who dominates and consumes the earth, as a human in full metamorphosis, in a hurry to change in order to survive. He is the one who becomes a flower and embraces plant otherness. Narcissus is the flower of spring and renewal, the one who opens up to the flowering of worlds.

Texts and photos cannot be reproduced - copyright SIxtine Dubly

 🫀♥️🌸

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