La vie domestique - Parc Saint Léger

«La vie domestique«
Marc Camille Chaimowicz / Moyra Davey / Lili Reynaud-Dewar/
Laura Lamiel / François Lancien-Guilberteau / Leigh Ledare /
Sébastien Rémy / Sabrina Soyer / Frances Stark /
Curator: Sandra Patron
Parc Saint Léger, Centre d'art contemporain
(Press release)
Opening friday 17 october 2014, 6.30 pm
18 october 2014 - 18 january 2015
/// Press trip from Paris: Friday 17 october 2014 for the opening of «La vie domestique»
and the end of the off-site project «Traucum»
Contact press: Léa Merit
03 86 90 96 60 / [email protected]
Parc Saint Léger, Centre d’art contemporain
avenue Conti - 58 320 Pougues-les-Eaux
03 86 90 96 60 / www.parcsaintleger.fr
«La vie domestique«
Marc Camille Chaimowicz / Moyra Davey / Lili Reynaud-Dewar/
Laura Lamiel / François Lancien-Guilberteau / Leigh Ledare /
Sébastien Rémy / Sabrina Soyer / Frances Stark /
Curator: Sandra Patron
PRESS RELEASE
Exhibition at Parc Saint Léger, Centre d'art contemporain
18 october 2014 - 18 january 2015
«Opening friday 17 october 2014, 6.30 pm»
Contact press : Léa Merit
[email protected] / t 03 86 90 96 60
(Important)
Friday 17 october 2014 :
Press trip from Paris :
- Opening of « La vie domestique » at Parc Saint Léger
- End of the off-site project « Traucum » At Nièvre’s Historical Archives Center with: Xavier Antin, Kévin
Bray, Erik Bünger, Ann Craven, Aleksandra Domanović, Jennifer Fréville, Dominique Gilliot,
Jémérie Gindre, Jack Goldstein, Alexis Guillier, William E. Jones, Michael Jones McKean, Mark Leckey,
Christophe Lemaitre & Aurélien Mole, Marc-Antoine Mathieu, Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet,
Ceel Mogami de Haas, Maya Palma, Aude Pariset, Pierre Paulin, Elodie Pong, Jon Rafman,
Manon Recordon, Sébastien Rémy, Soraya Rhofir, Rita Sobral Campos, Pacôme Thiellement,
Stephen Willats
Photo: Sabrina Soyer, One Realizes That This Creation Has No Limits, 2014
Parc Saint Léger, Centre d’art contemporain
avenue Conti/58 320 Pougues-les-Eaux
T. 03 86 90 96 60 / www.parcsaintleger.fr
«La vie domestique«
Having now tackled habitat from its social and political point of view (“Les Nouvelles Babylones,” 2013) and through
Jean-Pascal Flavien’s project entitled “Breathing House” (2012), the exhibition “La vie domestique” imagines what
plays out behind the closed doors of our domestic spaces and how those domestic spaces are a place of an internal
play of tensions and struggles as much as a place of desire, imagination and the writing of the self.
This writing of the self, to borrow a terminology associated notably with Marguerite Duras1 (and to which the show’s
title implicitly alludes), displays a tension between two psychological positions: the writing of the self to testify to an
identity (see, this is who I am) but also to bear witness to a change (see, this is who I am prevented from being). “La vie
domestique” is thus configured like a search, that is, the search for a demarcation of the self, and how that demarcation
is embodied in our domestic space, by turns a playground, stage and laboratory, with the aim of producing and
creating singular ways of being in the world.
The installation by the French artist François Lancien-Guilberteau seems to question us in an enigmatic way about
what is brewing behind those closed doors—brewing in the sense of a mean trick someone is premeditating in as
much as this writing of the self must constantly transgress a whole range of norms dictated by society. For Laura
Lamiel, this writing of the self presupposes that the subject makes possible the existence of a being that is necessarily
multiple, complex and fragmentary, one made up of shadows and light and a buried memory that is all about being
revealed, and which the artist will render concrete with an installation especially produced for the show. Here memory
and imagination aren’t allowed to separate, both work to deepen each other, as in the installation of the French artist
Sabrina Soyer, in which biographical elements connected with her grandmother and her coming out can be found side
by side in a room that has been dreamed up from allusions to Virginia Woolf and Huysmans.
Our domestic spaces are deeply ambivalent places then, and as an integral part of the construction of our identity,
they are also the place of our representation with respect to the world as well as the locus of social conventions, class
struggle and the struggle of genres. In his photo series Double Bind, the American artist Leigh Ledare lines up opposite
each another a double series of very intimate photos of his ex-wife, on the one hand, and magazine pages in which
women’s bodies are offered up to the gaze and male desire, on the other. How are we to arrange things so that our
domestic spaces are zones for activating and transforming reality and not a breeding ground of social reproduction?
“La vie domestique” explores this path from the personal connection to the res publica, i.e., public affairs, and postulates
that our domestic spaces can be machines of subversion and, in that sense, that the private is an eminently public fact.
This constant shifting back and forth between private and public space, the intimate and its representation, lies at the
heart of the show at a time in our collective history when new information technologies (social networks, chat rooms,
homemade movies) are reconfiguring our relationship to time and space, and increasingly blurring the borders between
outside and in, interiority and exteriority, living and working space, enabling each of us to fuse, superimpose, combine
and separate those borders. The Canadian artist Moyra Davey and the Californian Frances Stark use elements from
their own biographies in an internet mise en scène into what serves as a basis for the artists’ practice and how everyday
life, made up of reading and meeting with other artists, friends, or guardian figures, can infuse an artistic practice.
The show indeed posits that we are not alone in our domestic life, that it is pervaded with outside voices that come to
inhabit and activate it, as if to find one’s voice, one had to first let oneself be taken over by the voices of others, as if one
had to read the world before one could write it2. Thus, Lili Reynaud Dewar conjures up the writings of Marguerite Duras
and Guillaume Dustan; Marc Camille Chaimowicz, following in the footsteps of Jean Genet, presents a film-collage
inspired by “Les Bonnes”; and Sébastien Rémy, through such disparate figures as Howard Hughes, the Simpsons, and
Enrique Vila-Matas, offers us a subjective immersion in the history of the recluse and rooms, imagined by turns as a
place of travel and of confinement.
Sandra Patron
1 - La vie matérielle, Paris: Éditions P.O.L., 1987.
2 - In her fine text “The Problem of Reading” (A Document Book, 2003), Moyra Davey analyzes this importance of reading for herself and for artists
and writers she admires (Virginia Woolf, Italo Calvino, Walter Benjamin, to mention just a few), and asserts that reading, far from being a passive
activity, makes it possible to activate one’s presence in the world and, for an artist, serve as a powerful catalyst of forms.
«Events around the exhibition
- Thursday 16 October at 8.00 pm
Screening of Une chambre en ville by Jacques Demy.
At CinéMazarin, Nevers / In partnership with ACNE
- Wednesday 26 November at 7.00 pm
Performance by Sabrina Soyer, Les écrivains n’ont pas de corps
Confidential location, rendez-vous: esplanade du Palais ducal, Nevers
(Free entry)
- Friday 16 January at 7.00 pm
« Le banquet Duras », a proposal by Claire Moulène
To conclude the exhibition « La vie domestique », we propose to experiment the cooking of Marguerite
Duras, in which will be showcased some of her cult recipes. An evening organised by Claire Moulène, editor
of “Initiales”, a magazine published by the school of Fine Arts of Lyon which the issue #3, “Initiales MD”,
was dedicated to Marguerite Duras.
Limited places, reservation required at 03 86 90 96 60 10 €/person