Jaimes
Collective exhibition with Marina De Caro, Kapwani Kiwanga, Hana Miletic, Aurilian, Katrin Ströbel, Tadáskía and Ashes Withyman
Curated by Marie de GaulejacJ
une 24 - October 16, 2022, public opening on June 23 from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m.
R4, Friche la Belle de Mai
An exhibition co-designed and co-produced by Triangle-Asterides and La Ferme du Buisson, contemporary art centers of national interest
In co-production with SCIC Friche Belle de Mai
JAIMES is an affirmative and hybrid title where “I” speak to “You” about the need for the other to take shape and reveal mechanisms of interdependence between matter and emotion.
The JAIMES exhibition brings together diverse energies and experimental gestures through artistic techniques that have been conceived in tandem and associated with genuine filters and symbiotic constructions.
JAIMES examines the processes of creation and the social and political environments where artists situate their research, their media, their lines, their colors, and their forms.
The anthropologist and author Anna L. Tsing speaks of “resurgence”, which is a foundational idea of this exhibition. The polysemy of this term, which simultaneously evokes the renewed possibility of life or lives, fertilities, reconstitutions, rebirths, and reappearances, induces fabulous connections and precarious balances within the exhibition.
Whether through gouache, charcoal, pencil on paper, or a prolific system of cables and potassium alum crystals brought to a boil, artists Marina De Caro and Aurilian accentuate the frailties and sentiments of the soul. The politicized and performative drawings of Katrin Ströbel and Tadáskía occupy the sensitive writing spaces of the present in response to ambiguous feelings of the past; the result is transitory passages or choreographies dedicated to envisioning the future in a different way. Plays on physicality and experiments with research methods merge to create gaps in meaning that are essential to subjective interpretations and give a true place to the imaginary and
its representations. In his work, Ashes Withyman offers us samples of the awkward communications he shares with trees during visual immersions in forests, mountains, canal banks, and wastelands. Hana Miletić, who fosters an acute awareness of her surroundings, weaves together photographs to document the temporary repair elements she finds in public spaces, such as bits of tape on cars or ingeniously mended construction tarps. The incalculable amount of time the artist spends on her loom to reproduce these “patches” echoes the prolonged yet ultimately derisory time that Kapwani Kiwanga spends cleaning roadside foliage in Tanzania to make its chlorophyll green reappear; as she is filmed from behind, she repeats this simple gesture that breathes new life into these plants that are essential to life.
JAIMES initiates a fertile dialogue between artists who share a common need to contemplate forms of optimism, care, and hope as real and exceptional sources of nourishment that are present under our feet and in front of our eyes. This results in a creative emulation that allows perceptions, disruptions, and flows to circulate, and where the artists create the seams and stitches between themselves, thus delimiting zones of temporary joys in the face of eternal doubts.
“Outside the house, between the forests and fields, bounty is not yet exhausted.”
*From the work of Anna L. Tsing. A collection of Tsing’s essays was published in French under the name Proliférations with a preface by Isabelle Stengers (Wildproject, 2022.) The English titles of the essays are “The New Wild”; “A Threat to Holocene Resurgence”; and “Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species”.
