PARIS.- Conceived after a proposition by Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains, for its twentieth birthday in 2017, “The Dream of Forms” explores the unbroken, but accident-ridden, dialogue between art and the sciences.
How do artists and scientists currently arrive at original visual solutions, which help to reinvent the geometry of thought, outside familiar territories? The exhibition sets out to question the meeting points between artistic and scientific research by bringing together contemporary artists and scientists around the way they are now rethinking their relationship with the living world, and raising questions about the forms that inanimate or living matter can take, from the scale of the infinitely small to the infinitely big.
Without claiming to draw up an exhaustive panorama of the hugeness of this territory that unites the arts and the hard sciences, “The Dream of Forms” deals with some of the questions recently raised by the start of the Anthropocene era. Today, it seems that the relationship with the living world has become fixed, on the one hand, in the rediscovery of a complex ecosystem in which mankind is just one species among many; and, on the other, in the anticipation of a future world in which mankind will be gradually transcended, and even replaced, by the very machines it has created.
Conceived as an imaginary landscape, with many artworks which have been specially produced for the occasion, “The Dream of Forms” is being unveiled in two phases, with pieces by Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni marking a turning point in its direction: the plasticity of life and its extraordinary ability to metamorphose, which is set at the heart of the first part of the journey, will then give way to a second part revealing a post-human world, inhabited by mutant forms.
The exhibition thus conjures up ghosts, sow seeds, fructify protuberant organisms, and lay down germinating surfaces. This monstrous garden is inhabited by exogenous and familiar forms, born in the embrace of biology, mathematics, the neurosciences or physics. Such forms then enter into collision with images and objects, alchemies and grafts performed by around twenty artists over the past few years.
With: Francis Alÿs, Hicham Berrada & Sylvain Courrech du Pont & Simon de Dreuille, Michel Blazy, Juliette Bonneviot, Dora Budor, Damien Cadio, Julian Charrière, Sylvie Chartrand, Clément Cogitore, Hugo Deverchère, Bertrand Dezoteux, Mimosa Echard, Alain Fleischer, Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni, Bruno Gironcoli, Spiros Hadjidjanos, Patrick Jouin, Ryoichi Kurokawa, Annick Lesne & Julien Mozziconacci, Adrien Missika, Jean-Luc Moulène, Marie-Jeanne Musiol, Katja Novitskova, Jonathan Pêpe & Thibaut Rostagnat & David Chavalarias, Olivier Perriquet & Jean-Paul Delahaye, Arnaud Petit, Jean-François Peyret & Alain Prochiantz, Gaëtan Robillard, Gwendal Sartre, SMITH & Antonin-Tri Hoang, Anicka Yi
Curators: Alain Fleischer, Director of Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains and Claire Moulène, curator at Palais de Tokyo.
