“The critical mind” today enters a world woven by presences which are not necessarily seen with the naked eye, but which the mediation of painting, the camera or writing can bring into existence or feel less… We indeed enter two exhibitions whose universe is populated by the ghosts of the past, the specters of the present or the dreams of the future.
“The critical spirit” therefore goes to Paris to the Center Pompidou for the gigantic retrospective devoted to the surrealist movement for the centenary of the publication of its manifesto; at the Jeu de Paume museum which pays tribute to the filmmaker and visual artist Chantal Akerman; and finally at the Museum of Art and History of Judaism which offers an exhibition dedicated to the figure of dibbouk.
« Surrealism »
“Surrealism” is the blockbuster exhibition of the fall. It opened at the Center Pompidou on September 4 and will be on view until early 2025. It celebrates the centenary of an artistic, cultural and intellectual movement inaugurated by the publication in 1924 of Manifesto of surrealism signed André Breton, whose definition welcomes visitors in these terms:
“SURREALISM nm Pure psychic automatism by which we propose to express, either verbally, in writing, or in any other way, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, outside of any aesthetic or moral concern. »
The exhibition presents around 350 paintings, drawings, sculptures, objects, installations, film extracts and archival documents signed by big names of the movement, such as Joan Miró, Dora Maar, Max Ernst, René Magritte, André Masson and Giorgio De Chirico, but also artists who are much less exposed, particularly women, like Grete Stern or Suzanne Van Damme, or artists from other continents such as the Japanese Tatsuo Ikeda, the Egyptian Mayo or Mexican Remedios Varo.
Artists who were hardly present in the first retrospective that the Center Pompidou had already devoted to this movement, any more than the voice of André Breton, impressively reconstructed by the Institute for Acoustic/Music Research and Coordination (Ircam).
The exhibition is built like a radiance around the central “drum” where the original of the Manifesto of surrealismon exceptional loan from the National Library of France. The route is therefore thematic, with thirteen rooms or chapters supposed to embody the imagination of the movement, called “Dream Trajectories”, “Forests”, “Chimeras”, “Alice”, “Political Monsters”, “The Tears of Eros” or again “Hymns to the night”.
- “Surrealism”, curated by Didier Ottinger and Marie Sarré, is visible until mid-January 2025.
« Chantal Akerman. Travelling »
“Chantal Akerman. Traveling” is the title of the exhibition which has just opened at the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris and will be on view until January 2025. This « travelling » returns to the geographies and materials that make up the work of Chantal Akerman, both filmmaker, visual artist and writer.
Born in 1950 and committed suicide in 2015, the Belgian artist is in the spotlight, with the theatrical release of sixteen feature films, including Jeanne Dielmann, I, you, he she or even Stories of Americaas well as a box set, published by Capricci, of forty-six films. A visual program which also follows a copious work entitled Chantal Akerman. Written and spoken work and published in the spring in L’Arachnéen.
Chantal Akerman was one of the first directors to make the transition to what she herself called “art game”with the creation, between 1995 and 2015, of around twenty video installations presented in numerous museums around the world.
Many of these installations can be found in the Jeu de Paume exhibition, even if it goes beyond this, since it is also made up of a selection of films and a choice of archives from the Chantal-Akerman Foundation: scenarios, notes of intent and even filming photographs.
- The curatorship of this exhibition, already presented in an extended version in Brussels and accompanied by an exciting program of special screenings of Akerman’s films, is ensured by Laurence Rassel and Marta Ponsa.
« The Dibbuk. Ghost of the Vanished World »
“The Dibbuk. Ghost of the Vanished World” has just opened at the MahJ, the Museum of Art and History of Judaism. In Jewish popular culture, a dibbouk designates a wandering soul taking possession of a living person.
The supernatural creature that is dibboukborn in Eastern Europe in the 18the century, is part of popular beliefs before inspiring artistic imagination, particularly since the creation of Shlomo An-ski’s tragedy entitled Between two worlds. The Dibbukdating from 1915. This variation on the theme of Romeo and Juliet evoking the traditional Yiddish world, and the way in which dead souls seek each other beyond death, was adapted by Michał Waszyński in 1937 in what remains one of the most most popular in Yiddish cinema.
With around a hundred works, the exhibition explores the figure of dibboukthrough a journey combining painting, theater, cinema, music, literature and popular culture. This tells us in particular that “dybbuk” was the nickname given by the Mossad to the Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann when they were tracking him. But it also shows us how the Shoah, by engulfing an entire part of the European Jewish world, displaced the figure of dibbouk to the United States, before returning, in the 1980s, to Polish theater to play the ghost of a country without Jews haunted by its past…
- “The Dibbuk. Ghost of the Vanished World” opened at the Museum of Art and History of Judaism on September 26 and will be on view until January 26, 2025.
With :
- Magali Lesauvageeditor-in-chief of The Weeklythe weekly special investigations issue of Art Daily ;
- Victoria Le Boloch’ Salamaart critic.
“Critical Mind” is a podcast recorded in Gong studios and produced by Karen Beun.
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