31 Mar 2014

Eric Baudelaire & Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc at KIOSK, Ghent

EXHIBITION WITH ERIC BAUDELAIRE & MATHIEU KLEYEBE ABONNENC

The exhibition 'L'œil se noie' is the result of an intuitive dialogue between the two French artists Eric Baudelaire and Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc. Their work stems from a shared interest in the gaps and fissures that make up stories, as well as the challenges and promises they hold.

At the heart of their practices is a desire to highlight the tensions between what has been, what seems to be, and what could have been; to pick up the traces of forgotten and unresolved questions and divert them towards uncertain destinations, out of the dead-end circuits where things and thoughts get trapped in their own finitudes. In short, 'L'œil se noie' is about 'unfinished business', as one of the pieces in the show suggests. Sometimes quite literally, as in the case of Abonnenc's search for the lost film 'Guns for Banta' (1970) by Sarah Maldoror, a film dealing with the struggle for the independence in Guinea and Cape Verde that has never seen the light of day, or Baudelaire's work 'The Makes' based on some of Michelangelo Antonioni's unrealized scenarios.
In other cases, their work consists more of a rewiring of connections between one sense and another, between one time and another. The film work 'Ça va, ça va, on continue', for example, highlights the complications implicit in remembering, representing and voicing distant histories of anti-colonial revolt and revolutionary insurrection. 'Chanson d'Automne', in turn, is an assemblage of clippings from 'The Wall Street Journal' dated September 2008 that reveals a poetry of resistance within the fracture lines of a dysfunctional economic order. At odds with all laments of the 'death of the image' and the 'end of history', the works in this exhibition propose a renewed faith in the hidden potential of the present, puncturing the impasses and aporias of finitude, and giving way to the necessarily unfinished spaces for wandering and wondering.

'L'œil se noie' is organized in conjunction with 'The Fire Next Time', a two day program of interventions and screenings dealing with the militant image and its resonances (03.04.2014-04.04.2014, KASK - School of Arts Ghent). Both events are organized as part of 'The Uses of Art – The Legacy of 1848 and 1989', a project initiated by the museum confederation L'Internationale.

More information: www.thefirenexttime.be