The exhibition will questions the quality of documentary photography. It is clear that we share the belief that the production of optical images still works as a testimony of our tangible world. This belief of the nineteenth century, scientific and positivist, was shaken in contemporary capitalist societies by the unreality of our lives and the sensationalism of information. And the artists participate in reversing photographic codes, as Jeff Wall and Cindy Sherman.

For further information : www.centrephotogeneve.ch

The photographic work of Valérie Belin is to be seen "in the flesh and body" in a theatrical device designed by I COULD NEVER BE A DANCER, in collaboration with the artist. For the first time, we are invited to discover the humanity of her photographs of models in the ambiguity that bases its models which is between living and inanimate, original and imitation.

The device designed by the directors in fact focuses the eye on the surface of making images where the human artifice gives way to power and reveals the icons represented by the various characters.

Performance plays like a visual score, a series of portraits (a bodyduilder, the Michael Jackson of ballroom dancers ...), which combines the effects of disembodiment and "put away" with the humanity of the performers. The staging makes it sensitive to the taste of the foundations for the photographer and popular culture virtualization world.
 

Performance of 3 hours, which viewers are invited to choose the time from the beginning of their session (every 30 minutes).


Design and Direction: Valérie Belin & I COULD NEVER BE A DANCER
Space light: Caty Olive
Music: Yasmine Hamdan
Production: Centre Georges Pompidou / Zimmermann & de Perrot

with:
Ben Jack´son
Krist Jackson
MB Jackson
LIL MJ
Jackson T-Vain
smelly Jackson

To know the schedules and prices: Click here

To access the online tickets: Click here

The Illusions of Life is the first solo exhibition of Valérie Belin in Moscow. Legendary series of the artist will be presented, such as Mannequins, 2003 or Chips, 2004, and more recent works will exposed too as works from the series Balroom Dancer, 2008, or Black-Eyed Susan, 2010.

This exhibition takes place during the festival Fashion and Style in Photography in Moscow - 2013.
 
For any further information : http://www.mamm-mdf.ru

Exhibition from February 16, to May 26, 2013 (prolonged until June 23, 2013)

The Galliera Museum continues its programming outside the walls at the Docks - City of Fashion and Design, with the presentation of a new exhibition "Mannequin - the body of fashion."
Model is a key player in the dissemination of fashion. Created by and for fashion, it embodies the contradictions of an industry torn between creation and commerce, one of whose principal activities is to produce images. The first photographs of the nineteenth century to the pages of magazines, advertisements, videos, the model is reproduced indefinitely.

Borrowing its name from the wicker mannequins in private rooms of the nineteenth century the living dummy function is to bring the models to clients as to the target while keeping the status of "inanimate object" which showcases clothing to better sell. Yet the model, defined as a feminine ideal of beauty and youth, must seduce with any artificial perfection. Formatted duplicated in mechanical poses, shaped by makeup or retouching, this model body responds to physical and aesthetic standards, to sell the dream, leaving little room for realism. Since the birth of Haute Couture, high society women and actresses play fashion icons unabated. Later, professional models impose their face and name. Revealed by the designers or photographers, they become their muses, but recognizable moldable to suit their inspiration. Became stars, they sell lots of magazines.

From the anonymous models to the cover-girl, from the coatrack to the sex symbol, from the top model to the girl next door, these stereotypes question the aesthetic and human value from the model. By bringing these images, the exhibition offers a history of fashion photography from the point of view of the model and not just from the photographer. Nearly 120 prints, videos, fashion magazines and other works are combined. Famous photographs are alongside volume objects: models, dressmaker models, hobbies ... The Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont had the pleasure of lending a photograph of Valérie Belin from the Mannequins series, 2003. This series consists of portraits of wax models which give off a beautiful illusion of life. They belong in fact to a London brand that mold them on real women, but then these models are recomposed, the arms of someone will assemble on the chest of someone else, with the neck of another model to create... an ideal being.

For further information : www.paris-docks-en-seine.fr

The Viewpoint exhibition walks lines that cross between photography and other visual arts, between the museum´s own photographic collection and the collections of others, between contemporary art and echoes of the past. Viewpoint underlines the emotion that looking at an artwork can bring about, and in doing so it takes a clear position on the processes of collecting and exhibiting.

Viewpoint is about looking and being looked at, about inspiration and derivation, and about the punch that old artworks can still pack. The creation and experience of an exhibition can be compared with an intense game of chess between the parties, and ultimately, looking at an artwork is not so much about style as about impact: whether the art works for you. Museums have the task of keeping their collections up to date in every respect, and to expose them, not just to their public, but to other connections, other contexts, than the usual chronological, monographic, or stylistic exhibition forms. Viewpoint  is an invitation to regard an exhibition as an arena of tension between the artworks themselves – with all the complexities, conflicting energies, and mutual power relations that this entails.

Viewpoint holds the door open between new media (photography and film) and the world of painting. The resulting visual discourse reveals many relationships, a few of which this exhibition will formulate thematically:

1.) Looking at Picasso, with I see a woman crying (Weeping Woman)
In Viewpoint the ‘emotion of looking’ attains its purest expression in the magisterial work I see a woman crying (Weeping Woman) by Rineke Dijkstra. The work, which dates from 2009, was jointly acquired by Huis Marseille and Museum de Pont in 2010. This film proves once again that in the hands of a good photographer an ordinary video camera can yield extraordinary results. Rineke Dijkstra filmed a group of 12-year-old schoolchildren in the Tate Liverpool museum as they looked at Picasso´s 1937 painting of a weeping Dora Maar; the painting itself, however, is never shown. The children´s body language reveals the initial difficulties they feel in engaging with the work, but the more they allow themselves to be swept along by the painting´s emotional content, the easier this becomes. Dijkstra’s film shows how their cautious comments gradually turn into a torrent of words, of both agreement and dissent, and how together, speaking ever more quickly and openly, they give the emotions evoked in them by Picasso’s Weeping Woman a place in the world of their own experiences.

2.) In Making and Unmaking Selves Dora Maar comes face to face with the Chinese actress Fan Bingbing, photographed regarding herself in a hand mirror. Vanity? These days we seem to be more interested in the process of attaining perfect beauty than in the end result. With works by Valérie Belin, David Golblatt, Hubbard/Birchler, Mark Melvin, Sam Samore and David Slijper.

3.) The title An Embarrassment of Riches is taken from Simon Schama´s book of the same name describing the Dutch Golden Age. Here, benevolent but exorbitant portraits, still lives and landscapes unanimously express the conviction that abundance and sensuality invariably have dark undersides. With Antoni + Alison, Beate Guetschow, Yasumasa Morimura, Yuki Onodera, Shirana Shabazi, Han Singels and Sylvie Zijlmans.

4.) Saints & Sinners is about crowd behaviour, as for instance in the huge grid You and My Friends 1 that the American photographer Ryan McGinley made after spending four years photographing faces in the crowds at large outdoor music festivals. Many of the images are bathed in a single colour, the result of stage lighting. The vivid colours strengthen the emotions we see in the fans´ faces, and link them together into a single ‘youthful sublime’. A very different sense of the masses is evoked by the talking heads in Side Effect by Tony Oursler (1999). Saints & Sinners is about mass behaviour, solidarity, and the anarchic counterforces that these can provoke. With work by Sven Augustijnen, Luc Delahaye, Andreas Gursky, Cor Jaring, Daido Moriyama and Lieko Shiga.

5.) Distance and the intangible takes ´distance´ – in itself a concrete, measurable phenomenon – and compares it with the much more abstract idea of the ´distant´, the ´intangible´. Jochen Lempert turns his powers of empathy towards both living and stuffed animals, all but imperceptibly bridging the border between them. Roni Horn works in a similar vein, but her gaze is strictly analytical. Other works are by Ottomar Anschütz, Antoinette Nausikaa and Jörg Sasse.

6.) In Utopia, imagination is put to work creating worlds: the natural domain of photography. With James Casabere, Popel Coumou and Edwin Zwakman.

So this autumn Huis Marseille will link new acquisitions with older mainstays of its collection, as well as linking its own photographs with works borrowed from other collections, to stimulate energetic visual discourses in all of its various rooms. The stunning video and photographic images in Viewpoint will bring about a world of profuse artistic cross-fertilisation. And at this year´s Paris Photo Huis Marseille will be presenting a selection of works that emphasizes other aspects again, so the richness of its collection will truly attain full bloom.

In the summer of 2012 the Grimaldi Forum Monaco will be renewing its link with contemporary art. After having celebrated the icon Andy Warhol in 2003, brought together Jean Pigozzi’s African collection in 2005 and extolled New York’s artistic creation in 2006, the Grimaldi Forum Monaco has invited the Pompidou Center to exhibit a selection of its “large format” collection from July 13 to September 9.

The exhibition “Extra Large” is conceived as a voyage through the modern and contemporary collections of the Pompidou Center, focusing on fifty of its most monumental works, some of which are recent acquisitions or have never yet been exhibited in Europe. Goal: to lead the visitor into a head-swimming empathy with the work and enable him or her to discover the great names of 20th century art.

This spectacular journey, sometimes “dizzying”, punctuated by the great names of 20th and 21st century art, sheds a light on the concept of monumentality. It presents the very large format works of Joan Miró, Jean Dubuffet, Matta, Pierre Soulages, Frank Stella, Sam Francis, amd Yan Pei-Ming, but also presents sculptures, installations and environments by Joseph Beuys, Christian Boltanski, Daniel Buren and including Sol LeWitt, Anish Kapoor and Bill Viola: masterpieces of modern and contemporary creation brought together in a deliberately “non-standard” presentation.

This project is the result of close cooperation between the Pompidou Center and the Grimaldi Forum Monaco and is the dreamed of occasion for the Grimaldi Forum Monaco to show to best advantage its Espace Ravel jewel box and its 4000 square meters. And to cap it all, the evocation of this monumental approach to art is taking place in a country labeled as “the second smallest country in the world!” And this is far from being the last of the surprises for the public.