Uchronie ou Des récits de collection

Curator: Le Bureau/

Following an invitation from the Frac Franche-Comté and the Galerie Klatovy / Klenova (GKK) to present a selection of works stemming from both their collections, Le Bureau/ imagined an exhibition taking the fictional potential of a given collection —formed on this occasion— as a starting point.

Based on what is usually referred to as parallel universes in science fiction, Uchronie ou Des récits de collection suggests the invention of not one, but several narratives that could define this collection of Franco-Czech works. For this purpose, Le Bureau/ invited three authors – Thomas Clerc, Alexis Guillier and Jirí Skála – to write three short fictions inventing the origins of such a collection, considering its historical and political contexts, andor all its related characters. In this perspective, the term “fiction” remains quite open: it can be approached as a dialogue, an essay, a novel, etc. At the beginning of the process, each writer received the corpus of images of the works chosen by Le Bureau/, as a basis for their texts, without a necessity to be either exhaustive or descriptive.

While alternative realities — such as they exist in science fiction writings — allow a multiplicity of viewpoints upon identical situations, by placing them in various contexts, here these fictions allow the exhibition’s construction. Thus, far from illustrating the texts with the artworks, the curators will set them as a basis for context and reflection. The display will echo these parallel universes: all three fictions will exist together in the gallery spaces, allowing several contexts to read the works, multiplying their possible understandings and the imaginary they could provoke.

Four artists, represented in the collections of the Frac Franche-Comté and of the GKK, were invited to produce specific works emphacizing the fictitional potential of the collection generated by this Franco-Czech collaboration.

Uchronie ou Des récits de collection unfolds simultaneously in Klatovy (Gallery at the White Unicorn) and Prague (Gallery 35 – Institut français), before being presented in the region of Franche-Comté (France) in 2012, thus provoking a spatial continuum between two different geographic realities.

Artists :

AES, Hynek Alt & Alexandra Vajd, Zbynek Baladran, Julien Berthier, Etienne Bossut, Robert Breer, Martin Boyce, Dalibor Chatrny, Philippe Decrauzat, Hubert Duprat, Simon Faithfull, Cyprien Gaillard, Mario Garcia Torres, Christoph Girardet, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Milan Grygar, Stanislav Kolíbal, Eva Kot’átková, Radoslav Kratina, Jirí Ladocha, Bertrand Lavier, Didier Marcel, Gianni Motti, Marketa Othova, Hugues Reip, Hans Schabus, Jirí Seifert, Allan Sekula, Jirí Skála, Vaclav Strátil, Zdenek Sykora, Jirí Thyn, Adam Vackar, Jirí Valoch, Kelley Walker