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JEUDEPAUME.ORGSATELLITE 12

THE NEW SANCTUARY#JULIEBENA

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Anna & the Jesterin Window of Opportunity02 | 12 | 2019 – 06 | 02 |2019

JULIE BÉNA

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PARTNERS

Exhibitions co-produced by the Jeu de Paume, the CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux and the Museo Amparo de Puebla, Mexico.

The Friends of the Jeu de Paume and the Friends of the CAPC contribute to the production of the works and the publications in the Satellite Programme.

The Jeu de Paume is member of Tram and d.c.a, association française de développement des centres d’art.

MEDIA PARTNERS

artpress, L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui, Slash-Paris, Souvenirs from Earth TV

Thanks to Drawing Hôtel, Paris.

The Jeu de Paume receives public funding from the ministère de la Culture.

Its main corporate support is MANUFACTURE JAEGER-LECOULTRE.

CoverJulie Béna, Anna & the Jester in Window of Opportunity, 2019, vidéo. Coproduction: Jeu de Paume, CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux et Museo Amparo, Puebla. © Julie Béna et Galerie Joseph Tang

THE NEW SANCTUARY

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JULIE BÉNA

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CONTENTS

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THE NEW SANCTUARYSATELLITE 1202 | 12 | 2019 – 01 | 2020

‘Today, architecture is also ready and able to contribute to the reinvention of experience, not personal or sentimental, but affective and political.’ Sylvia Lavin

How does space determine the way we feel? Predicated on a sense of a threatening and hostile environment, one of the basic definitions of architecture is the provision of shelter and comfort for the human body. The common idea of dwelling as “surrogate skin” stems from Gottfried Semper, who described the animal pen, made of woven skins and leaves, as the origin of architectural “private” space. Today, this understanding of architecture as an enveloping spatiality, the modern desire to provide a place of refuge, no longer holds. Social, technological, demographic and environmental change has increasingly led to the management of the environment, the standardisation of lifestyles, the displacement of people due to conflict, persecution and gentrification, the surveillance of “private” sites of living, and ultimately the negligence of the body and the senses.

Designing spaces of belonging or fostering safe and hospitable environments remains one of the biggest issues in contemporary architecture. So-called “non-places”, spaces of transience and anonymity often constructed with cheap building materials and not significant enough to be regarded as “places”, are increasingly the architectural typology of the home. While the notion of architecture as a haven or sanctuary space has become a privileged conception, architects, designers and artists have long been interested in the bodily and psychological experience of dwellers. Richard Neutra’s Lovell Health House (1929), Frederick Kiesler’s unrealised Endless House (1947–60) and Arakawa + Gins’ unrealised Reversible Destiny Healing Fun House (2011) modelled on the Sanctuary of Asklepios are all examples of architecture designed to be experienced by the senses in ways that are affective and political. Could these – often failed, dismissed or forgotten – endeavours serve as models for contemporary architectural aspirations? And if we are to reconsider architecture as the meeting point between different cultural references, practices, rituals, desires and needs, how do we imagine a sanctuary space for today’s world?

‘The New Sanctuary’ proposes newly commissioned works by artists Julie Béna, Ben Thorp Brown and Daisuke Kosugi, who from the perspective of their individual practices, consider the capacity of the designed environment to host, care and engage with the body and the senses. A new animation by Julie Béna narrates an architectural tale about standardisation and transparency in which objects travel and morph, resisting commodification. In The Arcadia Centre, a film installation developed in dialogue with researchers working in psychology, neuroscience and education, Ben Thorp Brown proposes a sanctuary that creates a kind of “restorative” experience, and responds to the politics of our moment. Finally, an experimental narrative film by Daisuke Kosugi follows a retired Japanese building engineer who has been diagnosed with a brain disorder. Through an architectural journey the film reveals the character’s internal conflict between the desire for perfect efficiency and the acceptance of his declining body. The three exhibitions in this series bring no simple stories of architecture but underline the complexity of ever-changing ideas about how we (are) live(d).

Laura Herman (born 1988, Brussels) graduated from the Centre for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard, 2016) in New York, and holds a master’s degree in Comparative Modern Literature (Ghent University, 2010). Since 2016, Laura has served as a curator at La Loge, a space in Brussels dedicated to contemporary art, architecture and theory. She is an editor at De Witte Raaf, a bimonthly art journal distributed in Belgium and the Netherlands. Her reviews and essays have appeared in Mousse, Frieze, Spike Art Quarterly, Metropolis M and elsewhere, and she has curated exhibitions and events including Wild Horses & Trojan Dreams at Marres, Maastricht; Definition Series: Infrastructure, Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; Third Nature, Hessel Museum, New York, and Natural Capital (Modal Alam), BOZAR, Brussels. She is currently developing an exhibition exploring family as the legal basis of citizenship, property and the state, which will open at Extra City Kunsthal in 2019.

Background info:Each year, the Satellite Programme is entrusted to an independent curator, charged with designing and organizing three exhibitions at the Jeu de Paume. For the 12th edition of this programme, the Jeu de Paume continues its partnership with the Museo Amparo de Puebla, Mexico. Laura Herman, an independent curator, has been invited to curate this programme, entitled ‘The New Sanctuary’.

The three exhibitions will also be presented at the Museo Amparo de Puebla in 2019. The exhibitions of the Satellite Programme are accompanied by three publications. Each year the Jeu de Paume invite independent graphic designers to create the graphic or visual identity of the three volumes associated with the programme of exhibitions. The graphic design for Satellite 12 will be done by Groupe CCC.

Laura Herman curator of the Programme Satellite 12 © DR

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Julie Béna’s work is made up of an eclectic set of references, combining contemporary and ancient literature, high and low art, joking, and seriousness, parallel times and spaces. Comprising sculpture, installation, film, and performance, her work often seems to float in an infinite vacuum, unfolding against a fictional backdrop where everything is possible. Over the past years, Béna has developed a range of personal cosmologies in which she stages seemingly banal characters and objects that have enigmatic conversations and interactions with each other. From Pantopon Rose, a character taken from William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, to Miss None and Mister Peanut, a disembodied floating wig and the iconic monocled anthropomorphic peanut, Béna lends her characters a singular agency and voice—they are defined by what they are not.

In a similar vein, Anna & the Jester in Window of Opportunity, the opening exhibition of Satellite 12, The New Sanctuary, presents works that, through storytelling and the use of animation, have the stunning ability to bring to life characters that otherwise remain anonymous and inanimate. Comprising two sculptures and a new 3D animated film, Anna & the Jester in Window of Opportunity presents itself as a critique of transparency in the form of an architectural tale and narrates the curious encounter between a series of characters, both existing and imagined, while unsettling the distinction between virtual and real.

The film opens by introducing Opportunity, a transparent, corporate office desk made from glass and tubular steel legs. As a computer-animated surrogate it is the imaginary projection of the “real” table that Béna designed for Destiny, her exhibition at the Galerie Edouard Manet de Gennevilliers in 2015, and which in the foyer of the Jeu de Paume reappears as an uncanny double. A cold and distant physical object designed in a slick modernist aesthetic, Opportunity appears fixed and inanimate, yet in the film it comes alive as the backdrop against which the tale unfolds, unveiling its formidable capacity to transform into a building and landscape. Words adorning the glass planes of the table rise up to form flying songs, while the stainless-steel tubes become the tunnels through which the tale’s protagonists, Anna and the Jester, can freely travel from one scene to the next.

Though figuring as a singular character, the Jester merges two personas. This protagonist embodies the 18th-century “lady anatomist” and wax modeler Anna Morandi, whose anatomical waxes Béna discovered at the science and art museums of the Palazzo Poggi in Bologna, while also serving as Béna’s avatar¬—a nod to the artist’s upbringing in a traveling theater troupe. Discussing and traveling through different worlds, Anna and the Jester encounter three newborns based on the fetuses and babies born with biological irregularities on display in the

Anna & the Jesterin Window of Opportunity02 | 12 | 2019 – 06 | 02 |2019

Palazzo Poggi, whose scientifically objectified and “othered” bodies are reminiscent of the people featured in 19th-century freak shows. Together, the characters multiply to infinity forming a performing troupe in a musical comedy: a happy ending, an unexpected finale.

Beyond the pursuit of a clearly defined or “transparent” space inhabited by identifiable subjects or quantifiable selves, Julie Béna has dreamed up an opaque architecture, a sanctuary of sorts, for the dismissed and unwanted to come back to life. By sending Anna and the Jester to inhabit and vitalize the transparent architecture of Opportunity, Julie Béna gives free reign to lives that are relegated to the margins of society, demanding new definitions for who gets to be human and by extension the systems and architectures that are used to measure, regulate and evaluate them.

A catalogue has been published for the exhibition. Co-edited by the Jeu de Paume and Museo Amparo de Puebla, Mexico. Bilingual edition / French-English. 15 x 21 cm, 64 pages, €14. Also available in EPUB format for €6.99

Curator: Laura Herman

An exhibition co-produced by the Jeu de Paume, the CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux and the Museo Amparo de Puebla, Mexico.

The Amis du Jeu de Paume contribute to the production of artworks for the Satellite Programme.Satellite Programme.

This project was selected and supported by the Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques.

Julie Béna, Anna & the Jester in Window of Opportunity, 2019, video. Coproduction: Jeu de Paume, CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux et Museo Amparo, Puebla. © Julie Béna and Galerie Joseph Tang

JULIE BÉNA

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Julie Béna works on environments inspired by the worlds of literature, film, theatre and popular culture.

Proceeding shifts and displacements, Béna diverts everyday images and objects.

They gradually become the subjects of a variety of strange, poetic fictions. Through installation, photography, video and performance, the artist explores moments of transition, such as the passage separating night from sundown.

Julie Béna (born 1982, France) lives and works in Paris and Prague. She is a graduate of the Villa Arson in Nice. She participated in an exchange program at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.

In 2018, she was nominated for the AWARE prize for women artists. Her work has recently been exhibited at the Biennale de Rennes; Chapter, New York; the Galerie Joseph Tang, Paris; FUSED Space, San Francisco; Mathew, New York; and BOZAR, Brussels.

Recent institutional performances have taken place at the Fondation Ricard and Palais de Tokyo, Paris; CAC Brétigny; MRAC, Sérignan; Independant, Brussels; M Louvain; ICA and Delfina Foundation, London and Kadist Foundation, San Francisco.

Béna has just produced the end of her project « Have you seen Pantopon Rose? » at Centre Pompidou, Paris.

In 2019, her work will be presented in Paris, Prague, New York and London.

She is represented by Galerie Joseph Tang in Paris.

Julie Béna © DR

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1.-7. Julie Béna, Anna & the Jester in Window of Opportunity, 2019, video. Coproduction: Jeu de Paume, CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux et Museo Amparo, Puebla. © Julie Béna and Galerie Joseph Tang

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BEN THORP BROWNSATELLITE 12 06 | 18 – 09 | 22 | 2019

Ben Thorp Brown’s (born 1983, New York) work addresses embodied experience, perception and memory. Responding to ongoing economic, environmental and technological change, he seeks to develop possibilities for human agency within complex systems through embedded research, process and collaboration with a range of participants. Brown’s recent work has been presented in exhibitions at the St. Louis Art Museum; Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016, The Whitney Museum; Greater New York, MoMA PS1; 24/7 the human condition, Vienna Biennale; and Chance Motives, SculptureCenter, New York. He has participated in residencies through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace programme and at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX. He received a BA from Williams College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program. He currently teaches in the BFA and MFA programmes at Parsons The New School. He has received awards supporting his work from Creative Capital and the Graham Foundation.

A catalogue has been published for the exhibition. Co-edited by the Jeu de Paume and Museo Amparo de Puebla, Mexico. Bilingual edition / French-English15 x 21 cm, 64 pages, €14. Also available in EPUB format for €6.99

Curator: Laura Herman

An exhibition co-produced by the Jeu de Paume, the CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux and the Museo Amparo de Puebla, Mexico.

The Amis du Jeu de Paume contribute to the production of artworks for the Satellite Programme.

Ben Thorp BrownGropius Memory Palace, 2018, 4K videoCourtesy of the artist © Ben Thorp Brown

Ben Thorp Brown © DR

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DAISUKE KOSUGISATELLITE 12 10 | 14 | 2019 – 01 | 2020

In film, sculpture, performance and text, Daisuke Kosugi constructs seductive scenarios that entail an underlying conflict between personal freedom and systems. Whether by portraying how creativity is mined by the creative industry in a Post-Fordist labour market, or through a narrative of creativity that is not convertible to economic or cultural measures of productivity, Kosugi unpacks these struggles through the lives of individuals. His semi-autobiographical films guide audiences through intimate experiences where the conflict is rendered bodily and emotional. Through layers of fiction and non-fiction he constructs a self-reflective mode of viewing, a method of storytelling developed from his interest in empathy and the incommunicability of pain. Daisuke Kosugi (born 1984, Tokyo) lives and works in Oslo. He is co-founder of the Louise Dany initiative in Oslo together with Ina Hagen. His latest solo exhibitions include: Dawning of the Dance Floor, Podium, Oslo (2015), and Forgive Me for I Am Not Gentle, as a duo with Ina Hagen, INCA Seattle (2016). His work has been presented at: LIAF (Lofoten International Art Festival), Norway; CPH:DOX 2017 (Special in NEW:VISION Award), 11th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2016); and Malmö Konsthall (2016). He was shortlisted for the DNB Savings Bank Foundation’s Grants for Emerging Artists in 2016, Oslo Kunstforening (2016); and the International award of the Spring Exhibition 2016, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen. In 2017, he was an artist-in-residence at WIELS, Brussels.

A catalogue has been published for the exhibition. Co-edited by the Jeu de Paume and Museo Amparo de Puebla, Mexico. Bilingual edition / French-English15 x 21 cm, 64 pages, €14. Also available in EPUB format for €6.99

Curator: Laura Herman

An exhibition co-produced by the Jeu de Paume, the CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux and the Museo Amparo de Puebla, Mexico.

The Amis du Jeu de Paume contribute to the production of artworks for the Satellite Programme.

Daisuke KosugiMeeting Uncle Yuji, 2018, video Courtesy of the artist © Daisuke Kosugi. Photo: Oscar Qvale

Daisuke Kosugi © DR

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