État des Lieux #2
FLASHES - Ganz Angst

ÉTAT DES LIEUX
To mark our tenth anniversary in the year 2000 and everyone’s entry into the Third Millennium, we decided to give the Centre of contemporary art an even greater opening. The outcome is a special program called État des lieux, aiming to set up an inventory of the various aspects of current art.

Going against established practice, we decided to invite guest curators and ask them to take stock of what is happening in art now, with a view to describing the present and outlining the future. The project broke down into four events-exhibitions – four inventories – spread out over the entire year.

These État des lieux, events or exhibitions circumscribed in space and time, bring together artists in the broad meaning of the term, who focus on the concerns of the guest curators. Their job is to establish lines of communication between the various forms of thought for which art is the medium. Each of these presentations is a statement by the curator, expressive of his or her convictions.

FLASHES – VERONIQUE BACCHETTA
If all of a sudden it were necessary to define the nature of certain objects which occupy the landscape of contemporary art, “the multiples” – which exist in several specimens like any standard object – would be the paragons and the perfect witnesses. In a movement of jamming and crossing of the references and categories, the works come close to, without separating themselves of their state of single objects, with more pragmatic concepts, such as the functional one, the utility, the decorative, the pleasure, and also cultivate forms of empathy with entertainment, fashion, design, game, tourism or the craft industry, etc.

These hybrids which have a signification, some multiples and objects, extracts of an “intimate” environment, can be apprehended “in one vision” joined together on a platform which offers a smooth and continuous scrolling, carrying the glance in a movement of confusion and mixture between art and life, concern and humor.

The choice of only one multiple or object of Cosima von Bonin, Hans-Peter Feldmann (D), Vidya Gastaldon and Jean-Michel Wicker (F), Laurence Huber and Marie-José Blanquet (CH), Sidney Stucki (CH) and Xavier Veilhan (F) is thus presented on this platform.