Through Body & Text

The exhibition À corps & à textes [Through Body & Text] explores the contradictory yet creative relationship between the narrative, poetic and analytic potentialities of writing, investigating their wide spectrum of manifestations and their experimental results in the practice of seven international artists.

The conceptual framework of À corps & à textes could be described as a fragile equilibrium between coexisting strategies of employing written words as a motor for artistic creation: from an exquisite rarefaction of the art object through subjective narrations to an analytic investigation of language as a medium for regaining the physicality of the work itself. The heterogeneous pieces presented by the artists position themselves between these major attitudes: in the interstices of writing as 'dematerialising power' and in the folds of 'lettering as sculpting'.

The existence of endless poetic shadings, as countless as the narratives used by the artists in recollecting fragments of reality as a basis for their work, can transmute the most subjective everyday account into mythology and the most scrupulous analysis of a text into a physical object. Writing is the fil rouge that connects these extremes, creating a fluid field of encounters for the works on show.

Annual residency programme for curators at Noisy-le-Sec / Paris, France

Since 2006, La Galerie has hosted foreign curators for an annual three-month residency, in order to support an exhibition in a French contemporary art centre and allowing a discovery of the Île-de-France contemporary scene (artists, professionals, other organizations…). The annual residency for curators at La Galerie is receiving the backing of DRAC Île-de-France (Ministry of Culture).

Francesco Pedraglio is a curator born in 1981 in Italy, and now based in London where he cofounded FormContent with Caterina Riva and Pieternel Vermoortel.

Selected by La Galerie's board via a call for candidates to achieve his project À corps & à textes, he is in residence at Noisy-le-Sec from 6 April to 5 July 2009.

Guest curator: Francesco Pedraglio, in the framework of La Galerie's annual residency for curators

www.formcontent.org

Through Body & Text / À corps & à textes
Kurator: Francesco Pedraglio

Künstler: Orla Barry, Michael Dean, Clare Gasson, Falke Pisano, Reto Pulfer, Alexandre Singh, Richard T. Walker