ALTKIRCH.- Two exhibitions currently on view at CRAC Alsace are entering their final days, bringing together very different approaches to how the world can be seen, interpreted and reconstructed through contemporary art.
Rafael Moreno’s The World and Yuyan Wang’s Glowing, flaring, lurid, loud remain open through August 30 at the contemporary art center in Altkirch. The pairing forms part of the first program presented under CRAC Alsace’s new director, Elsa Vettier, and places Moreno’s attention to the material world alongside Wang’s fascination with technology, spectacle and manufactured realities.
Wang’s work often begins with images and ideas that already circulate widely through contemporary media. In The Moon Also Rises (2024), for example, she draws on a real proposal discussed in Chengdu in 2018 to launch artificial moons into orbit as a way of illuminating the city at night. The project becomes the starting point for a film that shifts between technological optimism and something more unsettling, questioning how easily grand promises about the future can blur into fiction.
The exhibition’s title, Glowing, flaring, lurid, loud, suggests that same world of brightness, excess and heightened sensation. Wang’s practice frequently examines the visual language of digital culture, advertising and technological fantasy, asking what happens when images become so seductive that the distinction between information, spectacle and desire begins to collapse.
Moreno’s The World, meanwhile, approaches reality from a more tactile direction. Rather than focusing on screens and mediated images, his work turns attention toward matter, presence and the physical conditions of experience. Seen together, the two exhibitions create a conversation between different ways of encountering the contemporary world — one driven by luminous images and technological projection, the other by a quieter attention to materiality.
Writing about the exhibitions in Zrodeux, critic Margot Nguyen described their meeting as moving between “dysphoric explosion” and an exploration of the material world, while resisting any overly simple or fixed interpretation of reality.
Visitors have several opportunities to experience the exhibitions before they close. On Sunday, August 30, CRAC Alsace will offer two free guided tours in French, at 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. Audio tours recorded with both Rafael Moreno and Yuyan Wang, produced in collaboration with Radio Quetsch, are also available for those interested in hearing directly from the artists.
The center is open Tuesday through Sunday from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.
After the exhibitions close, CRAC Alsace will be closed to the public beginning August 31. It will reopen on October 8 at 6 p.m. with new exhibitions by Fabienne Audoud and Michael Van den Abeele.
