Montag ou la bibliothèque à venir (Montag or the library-in-the-making)

Ignasi Aballí, Francesco Arena, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Dora Garcia, Mark Geffriaud, Rodney Graham, Camille Henrot, Claire Fontaine, Gary Hill, David Lamelas, Jorge Méndez Blake, Jean-Christophe Norman, Claudio Parmiggiani, Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza, Katie Paterson, Lili Reynaud Dewar, Özlem Sulak, The Book Lovers (David Maroto et Joanna Zielinska), Thu Van Tran, Oriol Vilanova

Montag or the library-in-the-making explores the links between literature and the visual arts, reflecting artists’ unflagging interest in the literary medium. It brings together some thirty works on the subject, either in the form of adaptations of famous texts via the visual arts (sculpture, videos, installation, design, etc.) in particular, or by directly reworking the textual matter, subjecting it to a host of transformations, new twists, recoups and other ‘affronts’. A final section is devoted more specifically to libraries, as well as to books, which are regularly the targets of censorship in repressive political regimes; in view of such violations book production has become stronger than ever among artists for whom literature remains an unrivalled field of experimentation and who are highly instrumental in its revival.

The number of artistic works that reflect this tendency more or less directly has grown steadily over the last thirty years, and exhibitions linked to literature have continued to flourish. Great 20th-century narratives such as Joyce’s Ulysses or Conrad’s Heart of Darkness have become key references for many artists who constantly revisit them and draw inspiration from them, as in The Joycean Society by Dora Garcia or Thu Van Tran’s successive takes on Conrad’s odyssey. Yet this literary classics approach should not mask the references to lesser-known or less consensual authors as exemplified in Lili Reynaud Dewar’s ‘homages’ to Guillaume Dustan and Chris Kraus, concerned with more contemporary issues.

Is literature just another raw material for artists? Montag attempts to draw up a non-exhaustive inventory of the ways that artists take hold of seminal texts in order to translate them into their language, thereby reflecting a clear will to ‘adapt’. The book, an object not long ago believed doomed to die out, has become the subject of all kinds of artistic experimentation, in terms of both its form and content. A symbol of resistance to the ever-increasing pace of our lives, books are also a universal symbol of resistance to opposition: Özlem Sulak’s offering is there to remind us that books are one of the first victims of repressive political regimes. It is also for this reason that Montag ends with an ode to the constant renewal of literature in the form of the collection The Book Lovers, a ‘collection-in-progress’ that brings together over four hundred works of fiction written by artists.
 

Curator :
Patrice Joly

With the support of Mondriaan Fund


Opening
Saturday October 14th at 6:30pm


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