Gilles Aillaud — Ed Atkins
Valentin Carron — Gyárfás Oláh
Shara Hughes — Jochen Lempert
Otobong Nkanga — Robert Rauschenberg
Yuyan Wang — Pamela Rosenkranz
Gisèle Vienne — Daniel Steegmann Mangrané
Luigi Zuccheri

& Vincent van Gogh, with the painting Trees, July 1887, Paris

As the signs that we need to rethink the polarity between nature and culture are multiplying, and when the harm inflicted on the planet by human beings is becoming ever more apparent, the exhibition “Human Nature – Humane Nature” invites us to explore the complex relationship between humanity and nature.

Vincent van Gogh, an enlightened, avant-garde artist working during a time of intense industrialisation, often evoked nature and the possibility of synthesis with it. His pantheistic vision can thus serve as a lens through which to consider contemporary works, to reflect on the differences and affinities today’s artists have with Van Gogh’s legacy.

Although the fourteen artists presented in “Human Nature – Humane Nature” seem to share the desire to foreground the urgent issues we face and to rethink our behaviours, they engage with different realms – those of dreams, of poetry, or the archetypical relationships between human beings and the plant and animal worlds. Their works, including sculptures, drawings and videos, capture apparently bucolic elements or evoke the disastrous effects of humanity’s domination over the rest of the living world, reflecting forgotten ways of being in the world from our distant past or existential questioning that has all too often been dismissed.

By focusing on the infiltration of the artificial and the digital into every aspect of our being, our daily lives and our bodies, certain works bring us closer to what is now both fundamental and essential.

Exibition curators:

Bice Curiger, Julia Marchand, Margaux Bonopera

Video in English, subtitled in French
Duration: 10 min

The films presented on this occasion all reveal singular types of relationships between humans and animals. In the course of nocturnal wanderings or waking fantasies, crows, stray dogs, wild boars and seahorses often become the main characters in these fictional or documentary creations.

Through the points of view they choose, these artists question the part of the dream contained in our relationship with the different actors of the living world, with whom we share the same living spaces.

In company of the film makers Benjamin Mouly and Elsa Brès.

Programme :

Patrick Goddard, Whoopsie’s Dream, 2022, 20 min
In English with French subtitles

Patrick Goddard was born in 1984 and lives and works in London. A graduate of Oxford and Goldsmiths Universities, he primarily creates video, sculpture and installation, while also working with photography, painting and drawing. His narrative and politically charged works undermine themselves with self-defeating black comedy as they trace the artist’s clumsy attempts to create personal and political integrity. His work addresses a wide range of topics: ecology, the Anthropocene and the animal, racial politics, gentrification and urbanisation.

Benjamin Mouly, For the birds, la sieste, 2022, 15 min

Man has decided to go and rest in the fresh air. He curls up in a comfortable carpet of grass and a raven invites itself at his side. From dusk to dawn, finding sleep becomes a perilous enterprise for our two guests.

Born in 1987, Benjamin Mouly is a visual artist. After a year of residency at the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid between 2019-2020, he lives and works in Marseille. Benjamin Mouly develops a multidisciplinary practice crossed by the question of the image. Using video, photography, installation or performance, he invests the gap between the bodily and visual experience of an unstable reality and the standardised techniques of its capture.

Andro Eradze, Nightvision, Limited access, 2021, 3 min

Andro Eradze, born in 1993, lives and works in Tbilisi, Georgia. He studied at the Shota Rustaveli Film Academy, as well as at the MFA program of the CCA-T (Center of Contemporary Art Tbilisi). Eradze’s practice explores the potentiality of animism as a method. Photography, installations, experimental film practices and video merge into a project contemplating the fading present, in which the Anthropocene flickers, and everything functions independently of it. Drawing on the legacy of alternative approaches to reality – surrealism and magic realism – his images blur the distinction between the imaginary and the real.

Jean Painlevé, The Seahorse (L’Hippocampe), 1934, 15 min

Jean Painlevé was a French filmmaker and biologist who was born in Paris in 1902 and died on 2 July 1989 in Neuilly-sur-Seine. He studied zoology and biology before devoting himself to cinema. Throughout his career, he developed innovative techniques that allowed him to film underwater and to produce close-up shots. He made more than 200 films, and participated in the democratisation of the animal documentary – his film L’Hippocampe was a real public success. Close to anarchic thinking, he joined the Resistance at the beginning of the war and made Le Vampire (1945), a film dealing with Nazism through the study of a South American bat. The Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris devoted a major retrospective to her in 2022.

Louise Lawler, Birdcalls, 1972–81, audio, 7 min
LeWitt Collection, Chester, Connecticut

For this work, Louise Lawler, an American artist born in 1947, made the names of various well-known male artists – including Vito Acconci, Carl Andre and Donald Judd – sound like bird calls. The humour and wit is counterbalanced by the fact that these white male artists are continually acknowledged as being at the forefront of art, its discourses and histories, with no symmetrical attention given to the significant contributions of women artists and artists of colour in discussions of advanced aesthetics.

Elsa Brès, Aux coups de fusil qu’on entend, 2022, 16 min

Elsa Brès was born in 1985 and lives in Bréau, in the Cévennes. She graduated from Le Fresnoy – studio national d’arts contemporains in 2017 and from the Paris-Belleville School of Architecture in 2012, where she taught architectural and landscape theory. Her films and installations focus on forces of resistance in contemporary landscapes, mixing research, narratives and experimentation. She is currently developing a new film in the rural French region where she lives, which deals with wild boars as allies in the struggle: Les Sanglières.

PROGRAMME:

Van Gogh, Alain Resnais (France, 1947)
Documentary, 18 min

A musa de Van Gogh, Thiago Pedroso et Rafael Frazão (Brazil, 2013)
Fiction, 15 min

Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase,  Joan C. Gratz (USA, 1992)
Animation, 7 min

Vincent 2, le retour,  Xavier Coton (France, 1991)
Fiction, 23 min

Bavure, Donato Sansone (France, 2018)
Animation, 5 min

From April 22 to May 14, 2023, nearly 40 artists and 1,000 works will be exhibited in various locations in Arles (Palais de l’Archevêché, Réattu Museum, Espace Van Gogh (former Hôtel-Dieu), Fondation Van Gogh Arles, LUMA Arles (Les Forges), Croisière – Actes Sud, Museon Arlaten, Enclos Saint-Césaire).

The Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles dedicates its exhibition spaces to this first edition of the festival by hosting the exhibition “Drawing on the margins” with the work of artists Victor Hugo, Aloïse, Marcel Bascoulard, Pierre Tal Coat and Jean Raine. The exhibition will also feature the painting Trees, painted by Vincent van Gogh in July 1887 during his stay in Paris and lent to the Foundation by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Read more on 5 artits exhibited at the Fondation below.

Théo Casciani is an author. Rétine, his first novel, was published by P.O.L in 2019. His texts have been published in several magazines such as AOC and Klima and presented in institutions such as the Kyoto Art Center or the Centre Pompidou. Some of his works have been translated into several languages and recently gave rise to the  seminar “Speculor” organised by ENSAV de La Cambre and the Université libre de Bruxelles. He is currently writing a romance novel to be published in 2023.

Chris Cyrille-Isaac is a poet, art critic and freelance exhibition designer with an interest in Caribbean philosophies and aesthetics. He is a member of AICA (International Association of Art Critics) and has been awarded the Dauphine Prize for Contemporary Art (2017), the Prix Jeune Commissariat at the 69th edition of Jeune Création, and the AICA Prize in 2020. He curated the exhibition “– Mais le monde est une mangrovité (But the world is a mangrove)” in 2021 at the Jeune Création gallery, and is co-directing the publication of the catalogue (Rotolux, 2022).

As a visual artist and musician, sound is at the heart of the work of Jérôme Girard, a graduate of the École national supérieure des Arts décoratifs. He invests and appropriates traditional skills to make musical instruments that immerse spectators in real environments where wandering allows the soundtrack of the space to vary. He was recently a resident at the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Duration: 45 minutes
Original version: English
French subtitles: click on the (CC) button to activate

Original version, French subtitles, 1h20 min
Teaser: https://youtu.be/MaSL5GxDl90

Synopsis

Until 1989, the village of Dafen in the city of Shenzhen, China was little more than a hamlet. It now has a population of 10,000, including hundreds of peasants-turned oil painters. In the many studios, and even in the alleyways, Dafen’s painters turn out thousands of replicas of world-famous Western paintings. Nobody thinks anything of an order for 200 Van Goghs. To meet their deadlines, painters sleep on the floor between clotheslines strung with masterpieces. In 2015, the turnover in painting sales was over $65 million.

Reaching beyond the predominantly white, male painters whose names are synonymous with the Abstract Expressionist movement, this exhibition celebrates the practices of the numerous international women artists working with gestural abstraction in the aftermath of the Second World War.

It is often said that the Abstract Expressionist movement began in the USA, but this exhibition’s geographic breadth demonstrates that artists from all over the world were exploring similar themes of materiality, freedom of expression, perception and gesture, endowing gestural abstraction with their own specific cultural contexts – from the rise of fascism in parts of South America and East Asia to the influence of Communism in Eastern Europe and China.

The exhibition features well-known artists associated with the Abstract Expressionism movement, including American artists Lee Krasner (1908-1984) and Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), alongside lesser-known figures such as Mozambican-Italian artist Bertina Lopes (1924-2012) and South Korean artist Wook-kyung Choi (1940-1985).

This touring exhibition is the result of a close collaboration between the Whitechapel Gallery, the Kunsthalle Bielefeld and the Fondation Vincent Van Gogh Arles.

Vincent van Gogh, Ravine with a Small Stream,
Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, 1889
Oil on canvas, 32,2 × 41,9 cm
Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation), Amsterdam

Vincent van Gogh, Green ears of corn, Arles, June 1888
Oil on canvas, 54 × 65 cm
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Donation Fondation Hanadiv

Vincent van Gogh, Landscape with snow, Arles, February 1888
Oil on canvas, 38,2 × 46,2 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Thannhauser Collection, Gift of Hilde Thannhauser, 1984

Vincent van Gogh, Trees, Paris, July 1887
Oil on canvas, 46 × 38 cm
Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation), Amsterdam

Vincent van Gogh, Undergrowth, Paris, July 1887
Oil on canvas, 46 × 38 cm
Van Gogh Museum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation), Amsterdam