“Unstable landscapes, captured in a desynchronized round of time [representing] new ecosystems in which the visitor is invited to immerse himself.”1 Such are the works of the Pinault Collection at the Bourse de Commerce in its new exhibition, initiated « against the backdrop of climate disruption, in the urgency of our present as in the eye of a hurricane. »
Dark gardens and obscure areas, « biotopes in mutation » and « micro-territories in gestation » plunge us into the wastelands of post-modernity, far from our lost paradises…
In the concrete cylinder of the rotunda, Danh Vo’s trees with crutches have grown. Branches uprooted by storms representing all the « decay of the world. » A « green hell » reminiscent of those « to be eradicated » during the Vietnam War. Not far away, Diana Theater’s Chernobyl « takes us into an irradiated landscape, an apocalyptic and radioactive theatre, » mixing beauty and toxicity of a contaminated nature filmed in the highly radioactive exclusion zone of Chernobyl, while Hicham Berrada’s Présage immerses us in a mutant visual landscape: filmed in real time, the degradation of metals immersed in an aquarium under the action of corrosive substances draws a chaos of decaying forms: a hypnotic metamorphic ballet.
No less destabilizing is Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s sound piece, in which the sound of invisible tropical rain resounds in the staircase in the image of the predicted climate catastrophe. Another chaos, « an entropic site where the ground rises up, where industrial residues contaminate the earth, where fragments of asphalt choke the vegetation while uprooted trees decompose in the mud, Pierre Huyghes’ A Way in Untilled, created in a fallow park in Kassel, projects us into a muddy dystopian world haunted by dogs with fuchsia-pink paws, strewn with yellow and purple plants that seem to herald some new kind of germination and pollination and open up the prospect of a new post-human era. There is no man either in the vedute, tiny landscapes on borrowed time, enclosing in their toxic sfumati and glazes their « possible fading. »
Stéphanie Dulout
1 Quotes from Emma Lavigne, curator of the exhibition, taken from the catalogue.
Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection
2, rue de Viarmes, Paris I
From 8 February
