LA DISPARITION

Opening Saturday, September 11th, 2010, 4 - 9 pm
September 11th - October 30th 2010

Kader Attia
Jonas Dahlberg
Leopold Kessler
Joachim Koester
Gregor Schneider

curator Corentin Hamel

The exhibition “The Disappearance” gathers artistic gestures concretized by erasure. Instead of following a thematic dissertation, the exhibition situates itself in a dialectic between expression and absence.

Thus Kader Attia paints large strokes on cardboard, a Water Kaaba, a black cube. It takes the water a few instants to impregnate the surface; at the end of the video, the water has evaporated. Leopold Kessler controls a streetlamp with a remote control, so that the gallery can turn it on or off at will. Jonas Dahlberg presents a diptych showing how he reorganized his apartment so that his daily life is completely out of sight of his neighbors.

If gestures like scraping, engraving, erasing can be considered “classical,” Edgar Allan Poe’s novella “The Purloined Letter,” can serve as the model for a contemporary mode of disappearance. In this story, a spy hides a stolen letter in an embassy. The police search for the letter, infiltrate the embassy, tear up walls and ceilings in search of a hiding place…all in vain. Dupin, the literary pre-figuration of Sherlock Holmes is then called upon, and finds the letter. The letter had simply been placed, in plain view of everyone, upside-down on a desk. On the verso of the letter, another letter had been transcribed.

In the video Good Old Times, Leopold Kessler reactivates a single chimney in a factory of the post-industrial region of Biella, in Italy, a phantomic image of bygone times. Joachim Koester re-shoots, keeping the same frames and the same technique, Ed Ruscha’s Real Estate Opportunities series, which documents properties in Los Angeles available for development. The series by Joachim Koester, entitled Occupied Plots, Abandoned Futures, revisits these places of potential futures and what they have become. The lots today, are less expressive built than they were yesterday, when they were vacant.

The exhibition “The Disappearance,” contemplates the intervention of each artist, their capacity to reveal a situation through a gesture of retreat rather than one of expression; their capacity to merge into a complex situation and to strongly modify it with a simple gesture that itself merges into the situation.