PARIS.- The project ‘Rêvolutions’ by artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, accompanied by curator Emma Lavigne, which will be presented at the Venice Biennale 56th International Art Exhibition, will transform the French pavilion into an oneiric and organic island. The inauguration will be held during the preview days from 6 to 8 May 2015.

‘Rêvolutions’: The project
The pavilion is partially covered by the foam previously used in the series ‘bruitformé’ [shapednoise], an expanding substance which flows from the top of the building, transforming the neoclassical architecture into a moving, living organism, which develops or evolves, in relation to noise; the flux of information captured and distorted.

Mobile trees, ‘transHumUs’, can be found at the interior and exterior of the pavilion. These create a choreography through their slow swaying movements and produce their own sound partition from the low-voltage electrical currents that their movements generate. The visitors become spectators and can follow the trees’ hypnotic evolution from the comfort of large sofas, in the half light of two side rooms, each equipped with a camera obscura, projecting an inverted image of the trees and the clouds overhead. This smooth and majestic choreography offers the visitors an opportunity to be immersed by an ocean of sounds made by the trees.

The organic island or ecosystem created by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot rekindles our taste for the beauty of Italian mannerist gardens, all the while affirming its contemporaneity and its implicit political dimension. By manipulating the systems that control human beings and their movements, he composes a poetic work where man can inhabit spaces of liberty and peculiar beauty.

During the Biennale, a catalogue accompanying the exhibition will be co-edited by the publishing house Analogues, and the Institut français.

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot was born in 1961 in Nice and currently lives and works in Sète. For over twenty years, his work has been presented in contemporary art venues in France and abroad, and essentially may be considered as the work of a musician. From 1985 to 1994, he was the composer for the company ‘Side One Posthume Théâtre’ of the author and director, Pascal Rambert. Céleste Boursier-Mougenot can be said to attempt to provide an autonomous form to his music through the creation of installations. He manages to extract musical potential from a diverse range of situations and objects and develops devices that expand the notion of partition to the heterodox configurations of the materials and media he uses to generate sound forms, most often live, and which he describes as ‘living’. Used in conjunction with the particular architectural and environmental features of the exhibition space, each device provides the framework for a listening experience wherein the visitor may observe and understand the music-making process. Among his most representative works, one remembers from here to ear, a large aviary open to the public: visitors could move amongst the birds, whose incessant movements produced a piece of music. For the past number of years, he has extended his practice to choreography, applying his ‘compositional’ approach to objects in movement. Recognized at an international level for a number of years, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot was the first French prize-winner of the International Studio Program (PS1) in New York, from 1998-99. He is currently represented by the Paula Cooper Gallery (New York), the Galerie Xippas (Paris, Geneva, Montevideo, and Athens) and the Mario-Mazzoli Gallery (Berlin). His work was recently on show at the National Gallery Victoria in Melbourne (2013), Barbican Centre in London (2010) and the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2009). 2015 promises to be an exceptional year for the artist: after the Venice Biennale, he will present a landscape installation especially designed for the Palais de Tokyo. He has also been invited to the Biennale d’Art Contemporain in Lyon in September and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montreal in November.