Playing with Bones
20 May–2 July 2022, Marseille
Rochelle Goldberg, Rosa Joly, Michel Journiac, Matt Mullican, Veit Laurent Kurz, Paul B. Preciado, Walter Price, Elif Saydam, Sebastian Wiegand, Belinda Zhawi.
Playing with Bones as a transmissive force that circulates between poems and artworks is essential to the composition of this group show that gathers artworks by artists, poets and philosophers of different generations and backgrounds, with the ambition to create a constellation of voices that will echo through the show, creating unexpected encounters as well as new meanings.
Envisioning art objects as the sites of a fluctuating energy that temporarily occupies and sometimes haunts them, this group show was influenced by the writing of the Californian poet Jack Spicer and in particular by After Lorca, a book of poetry published in 1957. In this book that includes Spicer's very free translations of Federico García Lorca's poems as well as a fake correspondence between the two poets, Spicer plays with Lorca's ghost and stages the relationship that sometimes binds a living poet to the voice of a dead colleague he admires.
Considering chance as both a poetic and structural creation, the Bones mentioned in the title of the show are less the physical elements or belonging to the physical realm (like the materials elected by artists to make a trace or give a body to their vision) than the syllables of a silent incantation that uses the artworks as amplifiers or echo chambers. Very close to what Spicer also calls transmission or dictation when describing the process of writing a poem, comparing the poet to a radio receiver that captures martian messages and transcribes them without interfering with their form or shape, the show brings together artworks without ever freezing them into an interpretation that would limit their magical resonance.
Initially rooted in the divinational practice of Tarot reading, Playing with Bones is also an occasion to draw a parallel between the tarot deck, envisioned as the transmitter of a magical aura that is both contained by the cards and that also circulates - between the querent and the person delivering an interpretation for example - and a work of art. In opposition to a more traditional movement of conservation that tends to immobilize artworks and reduce their scope in a pacifying and rather sedative way, the show acts as a reshuffling moment, an occasion for unsought genealogies to arise.
Group show curated by Rosa Joly.
Rosa Joly, Belinda Zhawi met in 2021 during a residency at Triangle-Astérides. Playing with Bones, an hors les murs project organised by La Traverse and by Scheusal Berlin, is a prolongation of this fruitful encounter.
Scheusal (Artist run space, Berlin), Fonds PERSPEKTIVE (French Institute in Germany), Triangle France-Astérides
