TEVA at Villa Datris: Transmute
Teva is a relic of a past journey that from the Villa Datris where it is exhibited until November 1st as part of Odyssées contemporaines, questions our present times.
Noah sails toward the hope of a better world, with no possible return. Yet, from the engulfed world, he carries with him the living, the pure and the impure, his beliefs, and the veryessence of who he is. He waits for the land to become habitable once more. He sails toward a refoundation.
But how can we recreate a different world from the same one, how do we change the world we carry within us? It so happens that Teva and two exhibitions I am participating in these coming months resonate with one another around these very questions.
The Bibliothèque Géographie de la Mémoire (Library: Geography of Memory)—exhibited at the International School of Geneva’s Arts Centre as part of Piece of Love until October 30th, materializes what we retain today of the past. Composed of drawers, altered books, and artworks—some reproduced reverently and immobilized in memory, others desacralized and reinterpreted as palimpsests. It reveals how the past remains active in the present. When idealized and frozen, it reenacts the same dynamic, amplifying them, an illusion of movement, a deepening of the impasse. When assimilated, however, it becomes a springboard.
For the past holds futures that have not always come to pass. For some time now, this idea has taken concrete form for me. I reclaim forgotten works, paralyzed or simply dormant to set them in motion. I have thus revisited and transformed palettes of paintings I’ve been keeping since 1995.These works will be shown for the first time from October 22nd in Paris as part of the Kreëmart exhibition Les provocateurs de la consommation expérimentale(Provocateurs of Experimental Consumption). They are part of what I call the Futur /ɛɡ.zo.se/— (future exhaussé or exaucé — elevated or fulfilled future) starting from what had remained suspended, to bring about the future it held in potential.
When Noah sets foot on the new land, he has yet arrived. He continues a movement that never quite ends. Like the Earth orbiting the Sun, like the reading of the Torah comes to its end each year and begins again, as it is doing these days, we pass through the same points again, carrying what we believed we had left behind, hoping each time to have move forward.
In a few weeks, we will once again read the portion recounting the story of Noah, the engulfed earth, and Teva sailing with the bird and with us until it touches land again. The same story, each time read from a different present. It is in this present, with all that we now understand, that our capacity to rise up and transcend ourselves unfolds.
