Una exposición coreografiada

CURATED BY MATHIEU COPELAND

A Choreographed Exhibition consists solely of movements. It showcases works choreographed for the exhibition by international artists, choreographers and musicians. Over the space of one month, three dancers will take over the museum’s various exhibition halls and perform choreographies of gestures, figures and displacements following written instructions and scores composed by Cecilia Bengolea, Jonah Bokaer, Tim Etchells, Karl Holmqvist, Jennifer Lacey, Roman Ondák, Michael Parsons and Michael Portnoy.

In the absence of any backdrops, sets, dramatic lighting and music, the movements "echo" in the otherwise empty galleries of CA2M, where the dancers are the sole focus of attention. The only bookends to the performances are the art centre’s opening hours and the duration of the exhibition. The gestures and movements, chained together in an endless continuum, become like floating, abstract forms that unfold and drift through the space.

The relationship with the spectator is profoundly altered, shifting from that of a person who moves around a series of artworks to one in which the artworks move around the visitors and carry them along with their energy and drive. The disturbing proximity of the dancers and their often unpredictable displacements also force the spectator to move and to keep changing position.

This exhibition by Mathieu Copeland takes shapes and evolves over time and only leaves traces in the memory, because once it is over all that remains is the memory of the performed gestures.

A Choreographed Exhibition was original coproduced by Kunst Halle St Gallen (Switzerland) and Centre d’art contemporain de la Ferme du Buisson, Noisiel (France), where the exhibition was held from 1 December 2007 to 13 January 2008 and from 8 November to 21 December 2008, respectively. The show is a major landmark in the history of exhibitions and the relation between dance and the visual arts. Revisited, modified and expanded following the parameters of the original show, A Choreographed Exhibition has been programmed again from 16 September to 15 October 2017 at CA2M, taking over the various spaces of the art centre to afford a unique experience of an exhibition of movement with a battery of unbounded forms and potential meanings.

PUBLICATIONS

Besides the unique experience of A Choreographed Exhibition, a whole host of questions posed by the show have paved the way to the book Choreographing Exhibitions, a manifesto-cum-anthology featuring input from over thirty international visual artists, choreographers, musicians, filmmakers, theorists and curators. With a new foreword by Mathieu Copeland and an essay by Manuel Segade, this is the first time the book has been translated into Spanish. Choreographing Exhibitions affords a compelling overview of the relation between choreography and exhibition and takes a look at how exhibitions are organised through the optic of choreography, exploring the various terms inherent to it such as score, body, space, time and memory.

With contributions by: Kenneth Anger, Jérôme Bel, Julien Bismuth, Giovanni Carmine, Boris Charmatz, Mathieu Copeland, Tim Etchells, Barbara Formis, Maite Garbayo Maeztu, Kenneth Goldsmith, Amy Greenfield, Abbie Hoffman, Karl Holmqvist, Pierre Huyghe, Myriam van Imschoot, Jennifer Lacey, Leclubdes5, Franck Leibovici, Pablo León de la Barra, André Lepecki, Alan Licht, Raimundas Malašauskas, Loreto Martínez Troncoso, Malcolm McLaren, Gustav Metzger, Lilo Nein, Phill Niblock, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Michael Parsons, Julie Pellegrin, Mickaël Phelippeau, Claude Rutault, Manuel Segade, Irena Tomažin, Catherine Wood.
 

TIE-IN ACTIVITIES

Visits Fridays at 7:00 pm. During October at 6:30 pm