Exhibitions2024-02-11T11:01:03+01:00

Current exhibitions

  • Gabrielle Goliath, This song is for… Vol 1, 2021 (détail) Collection Frac Bretagne © Gabrielle Goliath – Courtesy Goodman Gallery

This song is for… Vol 1

Gabrielle Goliath
10.02-19.05.2024
Frac Bretagne, Rennes

 

Gabrielle Goliath

This song is for… Vol.1

Work from the Frac Bretagne collection acquired in 2022

Presented as an interactive listening room, This song is for… vol 1 is a unique collection of six vinyl records, drawn from the artist’s multi-channel video and sound installation, This song is for… (2019). In this more intimate context, the tactile, interactive form of the records engenders a different kind of listening experience, in which rituals of care attend and grant reverence to the sonic experience.

In This song is for… Goliath returns to and re-performs the popular con­vention of the dedication song, in collaboration with a group of women and gen­der-queer led musical ensembles. Each of the eleven songs (six of which are included here) were personally chosen by a survivor of rape and subsequently performed as a newly produced cover-version. These are songs of special significance to the survivors, songs that transport them back to a particular time and place, evoking a sensory world of memory and feeling.

A sonic disruption is introduced at a point within each song, recalling the ‘broken record’ effect of a scratched vinyl LP. Presented in this performed musical rup­ture is an opportunity for listeners to affectively inhabit a contest­ed space of traumatic recall – one in which the de-subjectifying violence of rape and its psychic afterlives become painfully entangled with personal and political claims to life, dignity, hope, faith, even joy.

THE ARTIST

Born in 1983 in Kimberley (South Africa).
Lives and works in Johannesburg.

Through the ritual, sonic and social encounters of her art practice, Gabrielle Goliath attends (and tends) to histories and present-day conditions of differentially valued life, reaffirming ways in which black, brown, femme and queer practices of possibility perform the world differently. Each of her works convenes a coming-to – a tenuous community – collapsing the presumed remove and privileged subject position of representation (as white, male, heteronormative) and calling for meetings in and across difference, on terms of complicity, relation and love.

+ Download the exhibition guide

+ The texts of the installation are available here


Image : Gabrielle Goliath, This song is for… Vol 1, 2021 (détail) Collection Frac Bretagne
© Gabrielle Goliath – Photo Courtesy Goodman Gallery

By |10 December 2023|Categories: Current Exhibitions, Exhibitions|Tags: , , , |0 Comments
  • Ali Cherri, The Watchman, 2023 (capture-détail) © Ali Cherri. Courtesy de l’artiste, Fondazione In Between Art Film et Galerie Imane Farès, Paris

Le songe d’une nuit sans rêve

Ali Cherri
10.02-19.05.2024
Frac Bretagne, Rennes

 

In coproduction with

 

 

 

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Ali Cherri

Le songe d’une nuit sans rêve

Le songe d’une nuit sans rêve (Dreamless Night) is the first solo exhibition by Ali Cherri, a Lebanese artist living in Paris, in an art institution in France.

The exhibition present the new video work The Watchman (2023), as well as a series of original sculptures and drawings, specially produced for the exhibition, which relate to the symbolic elements and characters of the film, as well as to the geographical and cultural landscape of Cyprus.
Shot in Louroujina, a small village in the unrecognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, the film centers on the figure of a soldier who guards the southern border with the Greek-Cypriot-dominated Republic of Cyprus. During his long and tedious guards, the hills inhabited by the “enemy” become the scene of the soldier’s fantasies and daydreams.
The Watchman continues Ali Cherri’s critical investigation of border politics, geographies of violence, nation-building and the radical potential of the imagination. The artist also evokes the historical links of migration between Cyprus and Lebanon, as well as those between Nicosia, the divided capital of Cyprus, and Beirut, the artist’s hometown, which was also divided during the Lebanese civil war.

Curators: Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi

The Watchman is commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film, and co-produced by The Vega Foundation and KinoElektron. The film received additional support from Galerie Imane Farès, Paris, Robert Matta – Fondation RAM, Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, and Frac Bretagne.

The exhibition Le Songe d’une nuit sans rêve (Dreamless night) was presented at GAMeC – Gallerie d’Arte Moderna e Contemporaneo, Bergame, from 8.10.2023 to 14.01.2024.

It is accompanied by a monographic catalog published by Lenz Press and produced by Galerie Imane Farès, Paris.

THE ARTIST

Ali Cherri (1976, Beirut). Lives in Paris (France).

Cherri’s work is inspired by artefacts and the natural world. His sculptures, drawings and installations explore the temporal shifts between ancient worlds and contemporary societies.
Using archaeological artefacts as a starting point, he investigates the boundaries of ideologies that underpin the foundations of nations and the myth of national progression. His work explores the links between archaeology, historical narrative and heritage, considering the processes of excavation and relocation of cultural objects into museums.

Recent solo exhibitions include Envisagement, Giacometti Foundation, Paris (2024), Humble and quiet and soothing as mud (Swiss Institute, 2023), Ceux qui nous regardent (CAC La Traverse, 2023), If you prick us, do we not bleed? (National Gallery, 2022), Return of the Beast (Imane Farès, 2021), Tales from the Riverbed (Clark House, 2018), From Fragment to Whole (Jönköping County Museum, 2018), Programme Satellite 10: Somniculus (CAPC Centre d’art contemporain de Bordeaux and Jeu de Paume, 2017), A Taxonomy of Fallacies: The Life of Dead Objects (Sursock Museum, 2016).
His work has recently been exhibited at the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (Valencia), Jameel Arts Center (Dubai), Para Site (Hong Kong), MAXXI (Rome), Centre Pompidou (Paris), 5th Kochi Biennale (2023), 15th Sharjah Biennale (2023), 59th Venice Biennale (2022), Manifesta 13 (Marseille, 2020), the 5th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art (Ekaterinburg, 2019), the 8th Melle International Biennial of Contemporary Art (2018) and the 13th Sharjah Biennial (2017). Ali Cherri was awarded the Silver Lion for his participation in the international exhibition at the 59th Venice International Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2022.


Image : Ali Cherri, The Watchman, 2023 (capture-détail) © Ali Cherri.
Courtesy of the artist, In Between Art Film Foundation and Galerie Imane Farès  Paris

By |10 October 2023|Categories: Current Exhibitions, Exhibitions|Tags: , , |0 Comments

In situ Works

Le Pédilove

Anaïs Touchot
Permanent installation
Frac Bretagne, Rennes

Le Pédilove

This installation by French Artist Anaïs Touchot (born in 1987 in Dinan), situated in Frac Bretagne’s Canyon, is a space where the public is invited to relax, read, listen, scribble, hide, or chat, surrounded by barricades/palisades and tatami mats. Le Pédilove offers a place for lounging, encouraging bodies to adopt a slightly softer attitude, waiting and lascivious. Words painted on fabrics, table and signs play with expressions lifted from hypnosis, meditation, and coaching tutorials, adding a “fortune cookie” aspect to the artificial environment.

By inventing a space that borrows codes from multiple places, Anaïs Touchot carries on with her work as a “builder” or “demolisher” of shared spaces, affirming her role in the production of forms in which she diverts the weight of materials, removing any aspect of solemnity. A spirit of derision hovers in the titles of her latest works: “I will leave my old skin there”, “Muddy Glory”, “Lost Cat”, “Beauty worker”. These installations use catchphrases and buzzwords as a way of anchoring oneself in a shared banality, one that levels hierarchies, bringing together the art of the beauty salon, the football match, or the cat bar. “Relax, everything will be fine”.

The Canyon

The so-called “skylight” space was transformed in 2019 into a “canyon”, a hybrid space between an artistic experimentation platform and an educational space. It is inhabited by the passable installation “Le Pédilove” by Anaïs Touchot. It is a friendly and flexible place that promotes debate and the collective as well as individual experience – it is equipped with tables, seats, documentary resources, etc.

Visit Frac Bretagne
  • Peter Friedl Untitled (Corrupting the Absolute), 2000 FNAC 02-773 Centre national des arts plastiques © Peter Friedl – Crédit photo : Galerie Erna Hécey (Luxembourg)

Untitled (Corrupting the absolute)

Peter Friedl
Frac Bretagne, Rennes

Untitled
(Corrupting the Absolute)

Deposit of the Centre national des arts plastiques

Born in 1960, Berlin-based Austrian artist Peter Friedl is a major presence on the international art scene. He started out as a theatre critic in the early 1980s, before devoting himself to the visual arts, and he retains a strong connection to the theatre. This is reflected in his exhibitions, which are made like actual sets, with and without set changes, according to the complexity of the project.
In a quest for new narrative forms, his projects explore, in specifically organized contexts, the construction of history and concepts, always informed by revisiting major themes, including childhood, history, sociology and the animal world. With wit and irony, the artist points out the dead ends of modernity, between the utopias of yesterday and today’s compromises.
The many references in his works, and the various methods he uses to express them (drawing, video, photography, installation, etc.) constitute a dense corpus, blending the suggestion of personal history with that of the collective. Friedl’s work is difficult to grasp in an instant; rather, it demands to be considered dynamically. The artist explains that he is looking for ambiguity and confusion, never the precision of an immediate reading. In 1998 he claimed “that misunderstanding is part of understanding”.

Untitled (Corrupting the Absolute) is composed of handwritten letters in red neon.
It transcribes a reference, jotted down in one of the many notebooks that the artist – an attentive observer – carries with him during the course of his daily life, borrowed from the American essayist and rock critic Greil Marcus*.
An underground cult figure, Marcus likes to underscore the oppositions and contrary forces that construct an artist’s genius, just as Peter Friedl emphasizes the analogies as much as the ruptures and gaps that provoke vertigo.
“Corrupting the Absolute” asserts itself as an abstract injunction to remind us that art, if it exists, does not deliver answers, that it first and foremost pushes us to question ourselves. Installed in the lobby, this piece can be seen as an introduction to the philosophy of the Frac Bretagne.

*Corrupting the Absolute is the title of a chapter of the untranslated book: In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-1992, published by Greil Marcus in 1993.


Image : Peter Friedl Untitled (Corrupting the Absolute), 2000 FNAC 02-773 Centre national des arts plastiques © Peter Friedl – Photo credit : Galerie Erna Hécey (Luxembourg)

  • En coulisses, crédit photo : Aurélien Mole

En coulisses

Storage on show
Frac Bretagne, Rennes

En coulisses

Yes ! There are backstage at the Frac. The display is full of surprises, don’t you think? These heights, the visual echoes between paintings and photographs are indeed astonishing. Maybe you already know it : this collection is yours. It is a common good that a team of professionals is taking care of so that in decades, we can still understand and appreciate it.
The Frac Bretagne collection brings together works of artists from different generations and art scenes whether local, regional and international. Abstraction is one of the historical bases of the collection which also unfolds around thematic axes: works in relation to nature, that question the status of the contemporary image, the artist as a witness to his/her time, as well as as large monographic bodies.
The works go in and out from this storage for exhibitions and participatory projects. The FRACs are indeed the most widely distributed public collections in France. This principle of mobility defines these institutions as essential players in regional policies aiming to reduce geographical and social disparities in access to culture. Thus, FRACs are facilitating the discovery of contemporary art by the most diverse types of publics.
For you, the Frac has recorded voices to listen to. You’ll her an improbable flight attendant, fine connoisseur of conservation issues, witnesses recounting their memories of the works that you can see, technicians who know the collection better than anyone, works that speak to each other… and also the public with whom the Frac sets up numerous projects throughout the region and who has bring art pieces into their venues.


Image : Storage on show, 2021, Frac Bretagne, Rennes. Photo credit : Aurélien Mole

  • Richard Long, Un cercle en Bretagne (A Circle in Brittany), 1986. Parc du domaine de Kerguéhennec, Bignan © ADAGP, Paris. Crédit photo : Florian Kleinefenn.

The sculpture park of Kerguéhennec

Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Bignan

The sculptures of the Domaine de Kerguéhennec

The history of the Frac Bretagne is closely linked to that of the sculpture park of the Domaine de Kerguéhennec in Morbihan, which in the 1980s was a magnificent playground for artists as prestigious as Richard Long, Giuseppe Penone and Jean Pierre Raynaud.
Their experiments in this Morbihan park helped build the identity of the Frac and its collection, which is particularly oriented towards landscape issues.

WORKS FROM THE FRAC BRETAGNE COLLECTION

Free admission
The park is open every day (except in case of weather alert)

+ Prepare your visit


Image : Richard Long, Un cercle en Bretagne (A Circle in Brittany), 1986. Parc du domaine de Kerguéhennec, Bignan © ADAGP, Paris. Photo credit: Florian Kleinefenn.

  • Robert Milin, Chan’nic, Saint-Carré, 1991 © Robert Milin – Crédit photo : Frac Bretagne

Saint-Carré

Robert Milin
Saint-Carré, Lanvellec

Saint-Carré, 1991

In 1991, Robert Milin was invited to participate in Escales, an event curated by Jérôme Sans, which proposed to invest various places in the Côtes-d’Armor in a close relationship with the landscape. The artist then became interested in a small rural commune, Saint-Carré, and its inhabitants, with whom he made friends. Sharing with them the local life, at the crossroads of ancestral activities – work of the fields and care of the animals – and of the modern life, he has soon access to the personal photographs of several families.
In these boxes lie as many silent witnesses of the collective religious or secular events that have marked the village, as intimate moments that take on importance only in the history of each. He chose to bring 13 of these photos to light by enlarging them, transferring them either to enamel plates or to porcelain, and placing them, with the active complicity of the inhabitants, in different parts of Saint-Carré: the playground, the gable of a barn, the henhouse, etc. In doing so, he created a work of public art that overturned the usual canons, notably in the relationship between the private and the public: the private became public and the entire village an open-air exhibition space.
In 1994, the Frac Bretagne acquired Saint-Carré, a work that particularly resonates with one of its essential missions, to bring the citizen closer to the challenges of today’s art. Like any work in the public space, Saint-Carré has suffered the assaults of time and the vagaries of weather. Carried by the common will of the inhabitants, the Frac Bretagne and the artist, a restoration was undertaken at the good care of the latter in 2018. In addition to the renovation of certain pieces, this process led to the reorganization of the hanging, to take into account the changes in ownership, the evolution of the building and the roadway.

WORK FROM THE FRAC BRETAGNE COLLECTION


Image : Robert Milin, Chan’nicSaint-Carré, 1991 © Robert Milin – Photo credit: Frac Bretagne

Upcoming exhibitions

  • MEXICO. Mexico City. Olympic games. American athletes demonstrating against US race discrimination by clutching their fist. The american athlete Lee EVANS, winner of the 400 m in 43,86 sec. 1968.

The Olympic Games by Raymond Depardon

Raymond Depardon
14.06.2024-05.01.2025
Frac Bretagne, Rennes

 

In partnership with

logo LES INROCKUPTIBLES

Raymond Depardon

The Olympic Games by Raymond Depardon

In the summer of 2024, as part of Rennes’ Exporama contemporary art season and the Paris Olympic Games, the Frac Bretagne is presenting an exclusive exhibition entitled “Les JO de Raymond Depardon“.

In 165 photographs, the famous French photojournalist Raymond Depardon retraces the 6 Olympics he covered between 1964 and 1980.

In 1964, Raymond Depardon had been working as a photojournalist for the Dalmas agency for four years. He was sent to Tokyo to cover the Summer Olympics and thus took his first steps as a sports photographer. It was a winning move, as he ended up working for 6 Olympiads, until the Moscow Games in 1980.

During these events, the famous photographer learnt that, to capture the beauty of the moment, you have to be ahead of it.

This is how he managed to capture the feat, the strength and the extreme emotion: the despair of Michel Jazy after his defeat in the 5,000 m event in Tokyo (1964), the dazzling joy of Colette Besson winning the 400 m in Mexico City (1968), the legendary Olympic hat-trick of Jean-Claude Killy in Grenoble (1968), the grace and perfection of Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci in Montreal (1976)… images now engraved in the history of sport.

But Raymond Depardon, driven by his expertise as a journalist, also captured other moments, historic events that went far beyond the field of sport: in 1968, he immortalised the raised fist of African-American athletes in Mexico City, then in 1972, during the Munich Olympic Games, he witnessed the Israeli delegation being taken hostage. Stadium and history, culture and sport.

6 OLYMPICS IN 165 PHOTOGRAPHS

1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo

20 years after the end of the Second World War and its dramatic aftermath in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan opened up to the world by hosting the Olympic Games.

1968 Grenoble Winter Olympics

The first Winter Olympics organised by France, inaugurated by General de Gaulle and featuring the young skier Jean-Claude Killy.

1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City

The raised fists of the African-American athletes on the podium will forever remain the image of the fight for civil rights.

1972 Summer Olympics in Munich

These Olympics were sadly marked by the hostage-taking of Israeli delegation by the armed Palestinian revolutionary group Black September.

1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal

The young Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci achieved the highest score 7 times.

1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow

The Olympics were boycotted by a number of countries in reaction to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan

THE ARTIST

French photographer, film-maker, journalist and screenwriter Raymond Depardon was born on 6 July 1942 in Villefranche-sur-Saône.

He moved to Paris in 1958, then joined the Dalmas agency in 1960 as a journalist. In 1966, he co-founded the Gamma agency.

Alongside his career as a photographer, Raymond Depardon began making documentaries in 1963, notably on politics, with a 1974 documentary on Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s election campaign, which was banned by the President. Since then, he has made a number of films, taking his humanist approach to places as diverse as Chad, a psychiatric asylum, an emergency room, a courthouse or the farming community.

In 1978, Raymond Depardon joined the Magnum photo agency and continued his reportage work until the publication of Notes in 1979 and Correspondance New yorkaise in 1981. In 1984, he took part in a photographic mission for the DATAR, whose aim was to “represent the French landscape of the 1980s”.

While pursuing his film career, he was awarded the Grand Prix National de la Photographie in 1991.

His films also gained recognition: in 1995, Flagrants Délits, about the French justice system, won the César Prize for best documentary, and in 1998, he began his trilogy Profils paysans, devoted to the French rural world.

One of the characteristic features of his photographic work is his assertion of the photographer’s subjectivity.

« Sport is perhaps the speciality that best teaches us best how to ‘see’ well. A sports photographer is equipped to venture onto any other field. In the Olympic stadiums surroundings, I had the impression of becoming an athlete myself. Before a big race or competition, I stopped eating, drinking and talking. For a champion, it’s a year of preparation for a performance. For me, it was half a day waiting for a photo. » Quote by Raymond Depardon.


Visuel bandeau : Raymond Depardon, Un athlète afro-américain lève le poing en symbole de la lutte contre la discrimination raciale aux États-Unis. Mexico, Mexique, 1968 (détail) © Raymond Depardon/Magnum Photos

By |10 October 2023|Categories: Exhibitions, Upcoming Exhibitions|Tags: , , |0 Comments
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