Summary

In order to question and make visible the situation of research inherent to the realization of an artistic project, the backroom was invited to be part of Société Anonyme , a group exhibition held in Paris.

Société Anonyme was an experimental situation inviting 10 guests (artists, collectives and artistic structures) operating in different cities of the world, to provisionally anchor in Le Plateau, Paris, in order to initiate research and projects during a two-month exhibition run. During the two months, the exhibition will be an intense program of workshops, lectures and seminars, organized by the guests and the team of Société Anonyme, in constant collaboration with Paris-based artists and theoreticians.

Throughout the duration of the project, the backroom archive was constantly updated with new contributions. In addition, a series of projects and presentations were also held including:

Walead Beshty's Twenty-Four Hours Screening of Films Addressing the Armageddon
Including Omega Man (1971), The Day After (1983), and The Day of the Triffids (1962), in this series of films selected and presented by artist Walead Beshty, the disaster scenarios depicting the apocalyptic imaginary of the Cold War and the fear of a nuclear holocaust frequently stand as a metaphor of social change and, particularly, of the alienation of American urban and suburban condition of the 1960’s and 70’s.

Artist Talk and Screening by John Menick
Artist, filmmaker, and writer John Menick screened his short video The Secret Life of Things(2006), a work in which an unidentified man describes his fixation with "last person on earth" films - films in which a single person awakens to find that he or she is the sole living inhabitant of a city.
After the short screening Menick discussed his research into 'last man on earth' and apocalyptic films, showing clips from source material and talking about the work's relation to his previous video projects and writings.
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Artist Talk by Aurélien Froment
The man who saw the man who saw the man who saw the bear
Chinese whispers, broken lines and second-hand stories
Aurélien Froment attempting to arrange his archives.

#11

From early May till late June of 2007, the backroom was hosted at the Kadist Foundation in Paris, France, as part of a larger group exhibition titled Société Anonyme.

For this iteration, new contributors to the backroom include Peter Fillingham, Aurelian Froment, Felix Gmelin, Matthew Higgs (White Columns), Hassan Khan, Lars Laumann, Charlotte Moth and Artur Zmijewski.

In addition to the most recent contributors,the backroom featured materials from: Richard Aldrich, John M. Armleder, Walead Beshty, Pierre Bismuth, Anne Collier, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Dennis Crompton (Archigram), Jeremy Deller, Kota Ezawa, Claire Fontaine, Ryan Gander, Mario Garcia Torres, Amy Granat, Hassan Khan, Sam Green, David Hatcher, Paul Ramírez Jonas, William Jones, Stephen Kaltenbach, Thomas Lawson, Jesse Lerner, Lim Tzay Chuen, Nate Lowman, Lu Jie, Marko Lulic, Raimundas Malasauskas, Erlea Maneros, John Menick, Naeem Mohaiemen, Julian Myers, Michelle O'Marah, Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, Raqs Media Collective, Sean Snyder, Tercerunquinto, Jeffery Vallance, Miguel Ventura.

Images and Information

Société Anonyme is an experimental situation, organised around the temporary gathering in Paris of several artistic initiatives and art structures – either run by artists or curators – based in various cities around the world (Antwerpen, Berlin , New York, Prague , Zagreb, Beyrouth , Mexico, Amsterdam , Copenhagen, and Saint Petersburg).

These initiatives, who all work through different channels (journals, exhibitions, publishing, discussion forums, television, sound-making, film production, etc.) are invited to temporarily shift to Paris for a given period of time in order to find there a new relevant context from which they would develop their activities in collaboration with French artists and intellectuals. In this sense Société Anonyme at Le Plateau is envisioned as a kind of harbour where these different groups and structures would provisionally anchor in order to imagine and initiate new projects following each own particular terms, objectives and methodologies with like-minded French practitioners.

Invited artists/organisations are (provisionally list): 16 Beaver / René Gabri & Ayreen Anastas (New York), What is to be done? (Saint Petersburg), Erick Beltran (Mexico DF), tv-tv (Copenhagen), Nico Dockx (Antwerpen), What, How & for Whom (Zagreb), Tranzit / Vitek Havranek (Prague), Be-Books (Berlin), "Curating the Library"/Moritz Küng (Antwerpen), Roma Publications (Amsterdam)

The groups and organisations invited to Société Anonyme have been chosen for the ways they have invented and fostered original approaches towards artistic practices and production in the form of relevant alternatives to the mainstream art institutions (museums, galleries, commercial publishing, academies, biennials, art fairs, etc). As well as, of course, for their proven skills to intervene in local situations different from the contexts that they originate from and are mainly active in, and their openness to share their experiences of production with others.

By transforming, with Société Anonyme, the venue of Le Plateau into a kind of collective office or theatre of operations, the curators want to make visible and intelligible to the French audience the energies that fuel the practices of these different structures and collectives, their respective economic apparatuses, and the various modalities that they have engineered so as to stimulate the work of artists and researchers or to specify the contributions of artistic and intellectual productions to the contemporary world

Each structure will present inside the space of Le Plateau both parts of its past productions and the research in motion carried in Paris, through displays and a programme of public events (that can take the form of conversations, screenings, actions, small exhibits, performances, concerts, lectures, discussions, studio work, collective research situation, dinners, parties, etc). While multiplying the occasions and modes of encounter, exchange, dialogue and sociability with the public of Le Plateau and the French artistic community, we hope to promote a real circulation of ideas, problematics, and forms of dialogue within the contemporary art world, as well as inspire in Paris the imagination of new modes of behaviour, attitudes, practices and will in relation to art today.

All along, France-based artistic initiatives, artists, and art students will be involved as well in the activities and dynamics of the whole project. A publication with contributions that will be generated during Société Anonyme, based on the open-content and do-it-yourself ideas will document this experience.

For More Information Please Visit
Société Anonyme
or
The Kadist Foundation