Thomas Teurlai
Thomas Teurlai
Artist inhabited by a buried history of forms, materials and ritual practices, Thomas Teurlai invests spaces all over the world, from white cube to decaying industrial spaces. Uncovering stories, rearranging sounds, sculptures and human sciences, the artist brings back life and movement to abandoned objects and stories. From this meeting between the worlds of alchemy, DIY and the sacred emerge hybrid installations that solicit our erogenous zones. The visitor finds himself involved, body and soul, in these spaces of quirky poetry, where time seems to expand.
For his exhibition at Frac Bretagne, Thomas Teurlai focusses on subsidence, a geological phenomenon describing the sinking of mega-cities due to the pumping of underground water and intensive concreting. This global collapse serves as the start of a filmic wandering in subjective view.
Cyberpunk reverie where a ghost museum wanders its feet in the water, collapsing under the repeated assaults of spores and other antediluvian viruses. A wandering back in time, weaving together seemingly distant spaces.
There will be the mummies of street artists lying on the dusty banks of a stillborn story.
A radioactive granite astrolabe making up the soundtrack, like an inverted monolithic Theremin.
And a text as a epileptic spinning wheel, spinning the way off to exit the tunnel.
On the other side of the stained wormhole.
THE ARTIST
Thomas Teurlai (1988, France), lives and works in Clichy.
Graduated from Villa Arson, Nice in 2011, he completed his training with a post-diploma from the Lyon art school in 2014. In 2015, he was awarded the 17th Prix de la Fondation Ricard. His work is also presented as part of La Nuit Blanche and Ateliers de Rennes, Contemporary Art Biennale, at the Cantini Museum in Marseille (2016), at the Palais de Tokyo (2017) at La Panacée, Montpellier (2018) and at the Les Tanneries d’Amilly contemporary art center (2019).
Image : © Thomas Teurlai
Ghost Party
Ghost party
Artist Manon de Boer and choreographer Latifa Laâbissi meet in 2015 during a workshop around the influence of Oskar Schlemmer and the fluidity of working across media and different artistic languages. For both, pluridisciplinarity is essential to their work. They decide to deepen their collaboration in a deliberately dilated, stretched temporality, and in diversified work contexts like itinerant conversations, memories of reading and gardening, correspondence and collages.
Their dialogue steps out from result-driven processes, steady rhythms and prefigured calendars. Both de Boer and Laâbissi have consolidated trajectories and working methods and saw in their collaboration an occasion to challenge inertia and function differently. In this way, and over time, they are building a common corpus of images, a mental map that they activate and explore, questioning each other’s discipline and advancing into a priori unknown territory.
The project Qui parle? / Wie spreekt? puts the voice at the fore front. It questions the voice’s timbre, language and accent.
The project has 2 parts: one choreographic (Ghost Party I) and the other video (Ghost Party II).
THE ARTISTS
Manon de Boer (1966, India), lives and works in Brussels.
Manon de Boer completed her artistic education at the Akademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Rotterdam, and at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Using personal narration and musical interpretation as both method and subject, de Boer explores the relationship between language, time, and truth claims to produce a series of portrait films in which the film medium itself is continuously interrogated.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, at the Venice Biennial (2007), Berlin Biennial (2008), São Paulo Biennial (2010), Documenta (2012), Taipei Biennial (2016) and has also been included in numerous film festivals in Hong Kong, Marseille, Rotterdam and Vienna. Her work has been the subject of monographic exhibitions at Witte de With in Rotterdam (2008), Frankfurter Kunstverein (2008), South London Gallery (2010), Contemporary Art Museum of St Louis (2011), Museum of Art Philadelphia (2012), Van Abbe Museum, NL (2013), Secession Vienna (2016) and Groundwork, GB (2018), among others.
Latifa Laâbissi (1964, France), lives and works in Rennes.
Latifa Laâbissi mixes genres and redefines formats to bring onstage a special kind of of camera layering of figures and voices. The use of voice and the face as vehicles for certain states became irrevocably entwined with the danced act in Self-portrait camouflage (2006) and Loredreamsong (2010). Then, continuing her examination of the theme of archive, she created Écran somnambule and La part du rite (2012), based on German dance of the 20s. Pourvu qu’on ait l’ivresse (2016) is cosigned with the set designer Nadia Lauro. Since 2011, Latifa Laâbissi has been the Artistic Director of Extension Sauvage, an artistic and pedagogical program located in rural areas of Brittany. In 2016, a monographic book about her whole work is published at Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers and Les presses du réel. In 2018, she creates with Antonia Baehr, Consul & Meshie, a simian performance in a visual installation by Nadia Lauro. They also gather, in 2019, for the video Moving Backwards by the duo Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, presented in the Swiss Pavilion of the 58th Venice Biennale. On Summer 2019, the Festival de Marseille welcomes the premières of her last creation, White Dog, a choreography for 4 performers.
Image : Ghost Party (detail), Manon de Boer & Latifa Laâbissi
En coulisses
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 : View of the North gallery, 2021, Frac Bretagne, Rennes. Photo credit : Frac Bretagne