Group Exhibition Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, France
Kadist Art Foundation is pleased to announce the exhibition conceived by Dougal Phillips following his residency. The Grip / La Mainmise approaches the work of artists from Australia and South-East Asia (alongside European peers) through a post-colonial framework that refers to metaphors of childhood, history, and power to explore the practices and concerns of artists from this region.
A catalogue will be published on this occasion.
How do we grasp and hold onto the world? The Grip / La Mainmise is an exhibition project about knowledge – about the giving and taking of how we understand the world and the faith we hold in the putting-on of hands, in the law-giver and the forefather. The title is respectfully appropriated from the essay by Jean-François Lyotard, in which he writes of the affective grip (mancipium) of childhood and the adult fables of emancipation within the complex economy of the grip – the child whose hand is held lacks a hand.
The exhibition brings together artists whose works engage with the giving of knowledge and the phenomenology of power. Through performance, photography, film and installation, the works in this exhibition propose novel, returning gestures of taking-back, an image-based banditry that operates outside of the normal economies. The question is asked: How can artists liberate the image, profane the archive, and re-colonize ‘firstness’ or prior knowledge?
The participating artists are drawn from Australia, Singapore and Thailand as well as from Europe, and the overtone of the returning journey, colonized and never-colonized citizens re-inhabiting and re-imagining the a seat of imperial (philosophical) power. A new work by Thai artist Arin Rungjang creates an environment within the gallery for a reflection on modern philosophy as understood through an interview with Pier Luigi Tazzi* set against Rungjang’s father’s history and the touchstones of immigrant Paris. In her photographs, Michal Chelbin poses the strange familiarity between and father and daughter with mirrored gazes and an unbalanced and uncanny power relation.
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