27 Jan 2010

x Luxembourg – Forum d'art contemporain: EVERYDAY(S)

Bruno Baltzer, David Bestue & Marc Vives, Christoph Buchel, Claude Closky, Christine Dupuis & Thorsten Baensch, Cao Fei, Carmit Gil, Takahiro Iwasaki, Christian Mosar, Valerie Mrejen, Paula Mueller, Danica Phelps, Pavel Smetana, Pier Stockholm, Andrijana Stojkovic, Jiri Thyn, Eulalia Valldosera, Virginie Yassef

Performance 'Day, day, day, ich lieb dich nicht, du liebst mich nicht, aha aha aha' by Ici-Meme

Curators: Fabienne Bernardini, An Schiltz

Every day, so many gestures and words – unremitting, periodic, aic and often implicit – allow us to communicate, to act and to be. Everyday life, mostly seen as banal because of its characteristic recurrence and monotony, touches closely upon our existence as social and cultural beings. Questioning daily routine, playing with what is left unsaid, also means breaking with daily habits. In the raw, the dynamic of actions and utterances – some absurd, some violent, some convenient, some trivial – appear as a series of functionalities, backdrops, social codifications, strategies and human expectations, which are embraced and accepted uncomplainingly in their daily re-enactment. The accumulation of the daily bears witness to the evolution over time, and reflects states of change and rupture, of being and disappearing.

The exhibition EVERYDAY(S) presents eighteen artists whose works deal with the everyday or a fragment of our daily life. But while this 'raw material' – the everyday under its various guises – is easily accessible to the extent that it is shared by each and every one of us, these artists disrupt the common experience by changing the perspective. The installations, videos, photographs, drawings and sculptures in the exhibition take their inspiration from everyday experiences, while retaining only fragments, impressions or specific situations. Taking the real and 'ordinary' world as their point of departure, they deconstruct, distort or decontextualize reality by looking in a new way at the world that surrounds us and determines our lives day after day. Art as one tool of knowledge among many? Such is the hypothesis of the French philosopher Pierre-Henry Frangne: 'If we want art to fulfil a genuine function in the production of knowledge, if we want art to tell us something real in its own way, we must conclude that the escape from the everyday and from the fragment to which it necessarily encourages us is nothing but a paradoxical means to recover them, and thus recover ourselves: to recover our everyday experience in which the entity of that which we call 'our life' pursues but never catches up with itself.

On the occasion of the exhibition, x Luxembourg has published the exhibition catalogue EVERYDAY(S) with a text by An Schiltz and Fabienne Bernardini (French/English, 104 p., colour illustrations, soft cover), including the exhibition short guide with texts by Vincent Wilwers (French/German/English, 56 pages, colour illustrations) as well as a flyer with exhibition views.
ISBN: 978-2-919893-81-5
Prize: 20 EUR


The exhibition is supported by Pro Helvetia, Fondation suisse pour la culture and SEACEX Sociedad Estatal para la Acción Cultural Exterior.