The second transnational black biennial Af-Flux — which this year bears the title of Black transmission. A thousand paths of humanity —, an event which began last November, continues at the start of the year. So here is the 3e part of Af-flux 2023-2024, curated by Olivier Marboeuf with Moridja Kitenge Banza as consultant to the curator. After the Art Mûr gallery and the Maison de la culture Claude-Léveillée, Marboeuf, curator, author and artist, presents at the OBORO center a selection of works grouped under the title Intractable materials.
Khiasma
Let us recall that Marboeuf was the founder of Espace Khiasma, located in Les Lilas, in the north-eastern suburbs of Paris, in the former premises of a printing house, a contemporary art center that he directed from 2004 to 2018, year where the place closed its doors. Visitors were able to see creations from the Global South — with an emphasis on artists from Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean — as well as a tribute — in 2017 — to Canadian animation filmmaker Frédéric Back. It was a space where Marboeuf wanted to “develop local activities, while being, at the same time, connected to the international network. It was a center showing emerging forms of contemporary art linked to the issues of living literature, speech and questions of narrative.
Marboeuf explains how he “worked in contemporary art on questions of narrative from the 1990s”, while he was in the field of publishing, and “while French art was still very centered on art conceptual and minimalist art. Khiasma has become very popular, “because it was one of the first places to introduce postcolonial questions into contemporary art in France”.
The curator goes on to say that he always wanted to “show how art exists in a context” and how the context of presentation even changes the reading we make of the work. With Khiasma, he wanted to “create a place of conviviality where people could come together. The public was welcomed with their children on Sunday, but saw art videos, literary performances or installations on the other days of the week… Which does not mean that we only offered people what they wanted to see . We presented things that were often demanding, but linked to the history of the place and the people living in the Khiasma district, works which made it possible to engage in a long-term conversation with the Khiasma public… I don’t think that the curator is in a report on popularizing art to the public. It is certainly necessary to create the conditions for reception, but it is also necessary to have consideration for the unique intelligence of each person. We must offer exhibitions like a walk in the forest, where everyone can stop when they want, take a break from the complexity of a work that touches them, according to what each person is ready to experience.”
Beyond the object
Marboeuf has also worked extensively on the links between the human and the non-human in art. In a broader ecological consciousness, “if we do not want to destroy the world, we can no longer consider ourselves, the human being, as at the top of a pyramid of control of the world. The world around us has agency. And we must therefore accept that the world and nature act through us, and not that we must act on the world around us. The artist does not dominate the material, the world takes shape through the artist. Artists are in fact mediators of this world.”
On this subject, he has just finished an essay entitled The night of objectsabout the collaboration between the artist Manon de Boer and the choreographer Latifa Laâbissi, an essay which talks about the world from the point of view of objects “which wait for humans to leave the room to start another life”.
He insists on the fact that there are many cultures where the object is thought of differently… “In most indigenous cultures, the object is more of a mediation between the visible and the invisible than a simple product. This is why the question of collecting is problematic in indigenous art forms. During colonization, the West therefore manufactured objects which it placed in museums, while these “objects” were in fact links, “intercessors”… On this subject, we must rethink modes of symbolic reparations and not only restitution of objects. » These objects were linked to rituals which have been eradicated.
OBORO
As part of his exhibition at OBORO, Marboeuf continues this reflection on the fact that the world around us, with all the objects that exist, has a presence, a life that goes beyond our attention, a life linked to activities that we do not see or do not want to see. The presentation text, a creative text rather than an explanatory text, written by Marboeuf, refers to “all these people who are in an inverted rhythm of life, who clean the offices when we are not working there, who clean the town when everyone is asleep. But when the garbage collectors stop working, we become aware of their work… And it’s the same question that arises with immigration, our economies relying on the arrival of immigrants. Even in Italy, where the government is against immigration, we were forced to legalize 500,000 foreign workers last year…”
In the text on the OBORO website, Marboeuf also talks about the fact that his exhibition “explores the paradox of the visibility of black communities in globalized art spaces and the risk that black bodies once again become the raw materials of ‘an economy which overexposes and exhausts them at the same time’… He is wary of a form of spectacularization of the black body, because ‘slavery gave rise to forms of spectacles of death and punishment’. Marboeuf specifies that he therefore chose artists who do not provide the “expected” black representation. Rather, he wishes to show works where the question of invisibility is the subject of representation.