Inquiétances des temps
Curated for Abbaye de Maubuisson, Inquiétances des temps is a journey through the Centre national des arts plastiques video collection in five successive chapters, each a reflection on different forms of resistance.
It draws inspiration from Inquiétances des temps, (“the uncanniness of time”): the title of the French translation of volume two of Alexander Kluge’s Chronicle of Feelings. In this work, which brings together themes of instability, strangeness and the uncanny, the German writer and filmmaker considers forms of resistance that are echoed in numerous contemporary works.
Some 60 films selected from the 1,000 films in the CNAP video collection
Close to 60 films from the CNAP collection have been chosen for this online / on site exhibition.
They are steeped in present-day issues: questions of exile, the places we live, the individuals who resist, who fight for utopian ideals against the “uncanniness” of our times.
Together they give a perspective on a vast spectrum of generations, national and geographic origins, and narrative techniques. They reflect the diversity of the 1,000 films that make up the CNAP video collection, which in turn bears witness to the wealth and complexity of international video production, as well as video’s capacity to invent an art that is both visual and audible, and which maps a global geography and a cartography of time.
Multiple aesthetic currents
Certain films convey video’s faculty to construct a situation and to map human experience through animated images that recreate the performative dimension of this art. Others reveal the elaboration of visual architectures or enigmatic micro-narratives. A standalone collection within the Fonds national d'art contemporain (France’s national contemporary art collection), these video works form a coherent whole that bears witness to the many aesthetic currents which exist in contemporary creation.
Online / on site exhibition
The first four chapters will be online and the fifth will be presented at the Abbaye de Maubuisson this summer. Films will be shown on inquietances-des-temps.com and on the Abbaye de Maubuisson YouTube.
Where better to host these works than Abbaye de Maubuisson, the Cistercian convent founded in 1236 by the queen consort, Blanche of Castile. Home of religious communities, for centuries Cistercian abbeys played an important role in matters of art and culture through their libraries and their universities, forming networks across Europe.
The works shown in Inquiétances des temps are contemporary echoes of the humanist concerns that permeate the Cistercian cultural space: minority and vernacular cultures, work, habitat, the economy, territories in times of war, community and history. For a cartography of the present time that engages with the Abbey’s spirit and soul.
Inquiétances des temps
Jointly published by Cnap and Éditions HYX, Orleans.
Compiled in this work, texts by Pascale Cassagnau, Sylwia Chrostowska, Christophe David, Alexander Kluge, Vincent Pauval, Florent Perrier and Muriel Pic form reflective counterpoints to the films in the Cnap collection that question both the concerns of an era and history-making through images, at the same time recounting multiple acts of resistance: of film as a metaphor for reality deformed by the mental process, of counterhistory, of a critical time-archive, of the essay as a documentary form. Essay-investigations into the present of films, these texts also shape the contours of an ideal exhibition in four sequences while “exposing” the dream nature of the works; their prolongation in writing that reveals the latency of their aesthetic and political charge.
Additional information
Online exhibition
Abbaye de Maubuisson YouTube
www.inquietances-des-temps.com
25 april - 3 july 2021
• Chapter 1
"Vu de l’Etna"
25 april - 21 may
Films by Basma Alsharif, Marcos Avila Forero, Mali Arun, Guy Ben-Ner, Shirley Bruno, Olivier Dollinger, Randa Maroufi, Albert Serra, Joanna Grudzinska and Lou Castel
• Chapter 2
"Contre-histoire"
22 may - 25 june
Films by Florence Lazar, Dania Reymond, Allan Sekula and Marie Voignier
• Chapter 3
"Avant-dernières nouvelles du monde"
26 june - 23 july
Films by Yael Bartana, Eric Baudelaire, Shirley Bruno, Willie Doherty, Deimantas Narkevičius, Dania Reymond and Ana Vaz
• Chapter 4
"Portes battantes – Oeuvres ouvertes"
24 july - 29 august
Films by Lamine Ammar-Khodja, Marwa Arsanios, Filipa César, Jordi Colomer, Joana Hadjithomas et Khalil Joreige, Salomé Lamas, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa and Olivier Zabat
On site exhibition
Abbaye de Maubuisson
3 july - 29 august 2021
• Chapter 5
26 films by Louidgi Beltrame, Wang Bing, Harun Farocki, Dora García, Salomé Lamas, Gordon Matta-Clark, Deimantas Narkevičius, Jhafis Quintero, Marie Voigner and Hito Steyerl
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Artists
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Avenue Richard de Tour
95310 Saint-Ouen-l'Aumone
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