Remake. When video goes to the movies

Remake. When video goes to the movies
14.09.2019 - 05.01.2020

The Frac’s Remake exhibition looks at the connections between art and film, using a two-way approach. Whilst film is an underlying theme throughout the Frac collection, the idea is to explore how artists today reinterpret the history of the film through video, a medium that is well represented in its holdings. In addition to exploring this question, Remake has also opted to reproduce the exhibition being held at the same time at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen, which focuses on the relationship between art and film from a more historical standpoint. In staging a faithful reproduction of the exhibition layout, Remake develops a unique déjà-vu effect, whilst questioning the importance of the very idea of reprising, or creating new versions or adaptations in current artistic output.

Drawing on its own holdings and on major French and international collections, the Frac takes stock—from this premise—of artists’ inventiveness in taking on, diverting and questioning the codes and modes of the “7th Art.” From Martin Arnold’s animated films, Brice Dellsperger’s video explorations of drag and camp, and Shana Moulton’s surreal imagery, to Jonathan Martin’s and Stephen Dean’s abstract experiments, and the found footage championed by Gregg Biermann and Fayçal Baghriche, the exhibition comprises some 30 works by high-profile artists, such as Mark Leckey and Ulla von Brandenburg, as well as by lesser-known artists like Antoine Dorotte and Jerome Schlomoff.

Artists’ fascination for the cinema, its history and most recent developments, finds expression throughout this exhibition in works that toy with the concept of “remake.” The phenomenon, devised by the film industry as a new version of a box-office hit, here becomes a principle for reinvention. It is not so much a quote, a re-appropriation or a copy, as a reactivation or relocation. Remake explores in its very structure the idea of re-making. In its intent, the exhibition offers a highly original occasion to visit an entire tranche of the history of film, revisited in accordance with current artistic practices, and to illustrate the insight and vitality of video art’s relationships with film.

With Dennis Adams, Martin Arnold, Fayçal Baghriche, Guy Ben-Ner, Gregg Biermann, Isabelle Cornaro, Daniel Crooks, Stephen Dean, Brice Dellsperger, Antoine Dorottte, Ange Leccia, Mark Leckey, Rose Lowder, Jonathan Martin, Chris Moukarbel, Shana Moulton, Karl Nawrot, Yazid Oulab, Julien Previeux, Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, Hugues Reip, Jerome Schlomoff, Peter Tscherkassky, Salla Tykka, Ulla Von Brandenburg, and Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven

Director: Véronique Souben