Superamas phase n°4

La Cavalerie

How do you talk about the essential, how even do you attempt to attain it if not through simple and minimalistic motions that the artists for La Cavalerie offer. How do you give shapes and experiences presence, how do you preserve them for as long as possible from sight’s vampirism, how do you protect it from cultural disposition that eats, consumes, freezes, if not through the works that attempt to resist, of giving its all by keeping its distance, showing itself in a certain invisibility, to take on forms that do not allow complete definition or delimitation.

As with the preceding phases of Supercluster, La Cavalerie will be transformed throughout its duration according to the artists’ diverse propositions. Also, the construction and apprehension of the exhibition will be intimately entwined with the natural light and its variations, plunging at times the works into near darkness. The choice to do without the diffused light of florescent tubes, usually used in art centers, gives the objects their shadows back all while inscribing the exhibition in a temporality. In consequence, the opening and intermediate opening will take place on Saturday afternoons (instead of the usual Friday nights). The art center’s spaces will conserve the traces of the dismantling, left-overs of the walls and diverse constructions disposed in the preceding phases of Supercluster. This situation will put in to play the usual layout of the works in a space that is no longer of an empty, purified and immaculate disposition.

Several artists will be particularly invested in the exhibition. Marie Cool & Fabio Balducci will activate their works during the opening, throughout the first two weeks of La Cavalerie, and during its last week. They will create a series of simple and hypnotic “exercises” and motions, renewed many times over by Marie Cool. Bruno Jakob will create new paintings during the opening with energy, water and steam. For one of his interventions at the CAN, Bruno Botella will follow the protocol that brought him to create the piece Oog onder de put (Eye under the well), a sculpture created using a mixture of clay and a psychotropic substance. Several models by Andrew Lord, which tend to transgress the borders between contents and containers, shapes and counter-shapes, will occupy the space throught their enigmatic presence.

Sarah Lis and Pierre Vadi will intervene in the space in a second movement. Sarah Lis’ water drains will travel through the art centers space in concrete troughs. Pierre Vadi’s participation will come in to place through sheets of transparent plexiglass deformed by heat as well as resin casts of packing cartons.

The evolutional process of this type of exhibition implies that other artistic propositions will come to complete La Cavalerie in the last minutes of the film.

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Supercluster is an evolving exhibition which unfolds in the space of a year (from May 2012 to April 2013). This is declined in four phases, La Cavalerie being the fourth and last.

The idea of having a series of exhibitions in perpetual transformation, comes from a desire of the CAN’s team to propose a particular rhythm and temporality to the artists, conditions that are sometimes constraining and experimental in regards to the frame that art centers usually offer. Supercluster thus requires that the artists, participants as well as the CAN’s team to work together, intimately and often instinctively. Supercluster allows the CAN to renew its manner of functioning, to experiment with the limits of this last, and thereby develop an “institutional self-criticism”.

Opening February 23 from 14h to 18h

Second opening Saturday March 16 from 14h to 18h

Closing event for Superamas Saturday April 13 at 18h30

CAN team:
Arthur de Pury, Marie Villemin, Martin Widmer, Marie Léa Zwahlen, Julian Thompson