ALTKIRCH.- What is The World? If we had to state something certain about it, we could say that it is round and that it turns. And perhaps we could add that it contains an incalculable number of things, tangible or imaginary. When spoken in English, “The World” renders the notion even more totalising, more overwhelming, more chaotic. The exhibition The World shares this with the world. Full of objects and words that are in a constant state of rotation, it is a vast collage bristling with paper skyscrapers and full of holes. The figures that inhabit the space are mannequins with a fixed, penetrating stare: the Pinocchias. What might they think of the world?
The World is Rafael Moreno’s first solo exhibition at an arts centre in France. A series of new productions fills the first floor of CRAC Alsace. Sculptures, installations, collages, poems and films all reveal a patchwork appearance, as if they had been assembled hastily from found objects or were in a constant process of being made. In this explicitly DIY approach, the gesture always remains visible and connected to a set of considerations about what makes the world turn: the distinction between human and machine, the fictional nature of gender, our debt system. Envisioned specifically for the spaces of CRAC Alsace, the exhibition is the result of a broad interlocking process in which sculptures become films, poetry becomes object, and installations are images that we observe by peering through peepholes. In fact, not everything is visible in The World; the exhibition rooms are connected to other spaces within the arts centre that remain inaccessible to the public, such as the attic and the crawlspaces above the drop ceiling, from which some images are broadcasted. The exhibition takes on the form of an immense brain that recycles lived experiences and unconscious projections. Its meanderings are the streets that the Pinocchias explore endlessly.
Glowing, flaring, lurid, loud—Yuyan Wang
Curated by Elsa Vettier
In the space of a single moment, a few rock fragments shine at the bottom of a cave. The beam of light that reveals them then begins to climb through a narrow passage up to the earth’s surface. Before it gets there, it lingers in tunnels and lights up mineral walls that glow blue, green, and fluorescent. This is the beginning of a film by Yuyan Wang, but it could just as well be the very beginning of cinema itself: a light source projected onto the wall of a cave reveals images that, until then, had remained shrouded in darkness.
Centred on her film work and collection of found footage, Yuyan Wang’s exhibition dissects the raw material of cinema, which is artificial light. Titled Glowing, flaring, lurid, loud after a verse by Derek Jarman, it plays with the materiality of images and the way that light acts on our senses and perception of time. The exhibition places two films across from each other, one at each end of the ground floor: Look on the Bright Side (2023) and The Moon Also Rises (2022). The former, a montage of highly disparate images found online and documentary sequences, traces the origins of artificial light from the depths of the earth to our public lighting systems, by way of factories that manufacture LEDs. The latter, filmed by the artist in China, depicts two old people in the half-light of their apartment while news channels discuss the launch of artificial moons in our orbit. These two exercises in chiaroscuro exemplify different kinds of filmmaking: one, made without a camera, consists essentially of a montage of amateur documentary images, while the other stages a fiction filmed by the artist herself. While the endless flow of images and the desire to create new moons seems to push back the boundaries of darkness, the rest of the exhibition embraces a primordial kind of cinema. The power of our attraction to light creates its own images: a shadow theatre featuring insects as its main characters.
