Vos désirs sont les nôtres
Collective show by Maayan Amir & Ruti Sela, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, Jean-Charles de Quillacq, Roee Rosen, Liv Schulman and Ghita Skali
Curated by: Marie de Gaulejac and Céline Kopp
June 29 — October 21, 2018, public opening on June 28, 6PM - 10PM
3rd floor - Tour Panorama, Friche la Belle de Mai
The first breath of this exhibition is in its title. Vos désirs sont les nôtres [Your desires are ours] addresses itself at you, at us, at them. It détournes the well known expression: “your wish is my command”, in a radical and violent way blurring it with doubt and inflecting it with bodily urges and frictions. This primarily carnal and sensual address allows these bodies to speak, to ‘assemble’ their desires. The word desire (wish/want), so often used in formulating a demand or outlining a need, instead is used here to work against this sense, to bring fluidity and mobility to our relationship to reality and fiction.
“Desire is constructivist”, Gilles Deleuze affirms in his celebrated From A to Z, where he speaks of desire in terms of an “assemblage” or “landscape”. Resting on this idea of construction, the works put together here by Maayan Amir & Ruti Sela, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, Jean-Charles de Quillacq, Roee Rosen, Liv Schulman and Ghita Skali, pile up the aches, differences, blindnesses, and dependences experienced when faced with consent. These are different interpretative visions, provocations sometimes verging on sarcasm, brought forward by each artist to constitute their own “assemblage”, their narrative.
Ghita Skalia designs stage sets of sites of domination in the face of authority; starting from real facts, the artist hollows out and shakes up forms of absolute power. Kudzanai-Violet Hwami’s work is bound up in exploring hope and family. Her painting is affirmative of bodies and of their right to self-definition.
The aforementioned idea of ‘breath’ evokes respiration, one of the driving forces in the videos of Roee Rosen, Liv Schulman and in Jean-Charles de Quillacq’s manipulation of rope. This ‘breath’ puts almost naked bodies into action, themselves provocative of a damp indifference, or accelerators of intrusive violences, which we also find in the Maayan Amir & Ruti Sela’s trilogy, where images dare to link establish sex as “the corollary of capitalism and war, the mirror of production” “sex to capital and in reflection, war to production (1)”.
Now we consider ‘touch’. Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz’s hair tableaux give important anchorage to the exhibition. These postiche works represent a return to matter, to the sensation of flesh. Through this physical sheath, they also bring us closer to our own sexual bodies, working through ‘otherness’ and offering contact.
Finally, placed in an agora at the centre of the exhibition, a vision of the city of Marseille, inhabited by its present post-colonial and identitarian splits, and investigated from the standpoint of the port of Jaffa. Made specially for the occasion by Roee Rosen and Ruti Sela, the joint work questions de-centring: a touristic advertorial on Marseille, it is filmed in an absurd manner in another city. This intersectional collaboration, led by a group of Ruti Sela and Roee Rosen’s students, evokes one after the other the troubles, tendencies toward control, the jingoistic enthusiasms and reserves of significant members of Marseille. A tangle of portraits tinted with a grating, dark humour and nebulous storytellings, at once vague and speculative. The work in progress was filmed recently and is presented as such in a deliberately simple and documentary style.
Vos désirs sont les nôtres is an introspection through fluidity, an unconscious approach to our fears, which has multiple affinities with the critical theory of Paul B. Preciado, writing on the pharmaco-pornographic control of contemporary bio-capitalism, in his celebrated work Testo Junkie. He describes an era that “produces movable ideas, living organs, symbols, desires, chemical reactions, and affects (2)”, where the pharmaceutical industry and the audiovisual industry are both masters and producers.
From stories to stories, images after images, this exhibition calls out to beings where bodies draw together and push apart for a sensation of existing close to emptiness.
(1), (2) : Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie : Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic era, tr. Bruce Benderson (New York: The Feminist Press, CUNY, 2013) p. 40 - p.54