Garden /
The sixth installment of Royal Garden is designed as a prolongation of The Registry of Promise, a cycle of four shows developed by Chris Sharp and jointly mounted by four art venues in Europe. All of the artists who took part in the shows, along with the four venues’ directors who worked together to make this undertaking a reality, were each asked to come up with an entirely new intervention echoing the cycle, and have thus created an open and evolving archive like the “Registry of Promise” that lies at the heart of the four exhibitions.
Contributors include Patrick Bernatchez, Becky Beasley, Juliette Blightman, Peter Buggenhout, Nina Canell, Michael Dean, Adrienne Drake, Alexander Gutke, Jochen Lempert, Claire Le Restif, Jean-Luc-Moulène, Marlie Mul, Antoine Nessi, Sandra Patron, Jean-Marie Perdrix, Reto Pulfer, Hans Schabus, Lucy Skaer, Michael E. Smith, Chris Sharp and Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli.
Curators: Chris Sharp and Claire Le Restif
Design and development: The Shelf Company
Royal Garden is made possible in part by the generous support of the Région Île-de-France
Vegetal Passion sees the exhibition space as the natural milieu of works of art. The artist and curator duo It's Our Playground (Camille Le Houezec & Jocelyn Villemont) has imagined this 5th installment of Royal Garden as an ambiguous jungle in which visitors will find artists' pieces, archival photographs and images gleaned from the internet, all shown side by side without any obvious hierarchy.
Deftly mixing plants and works of art, works that involve plants and "exhibition plants," this curatorial project takes a new look at gardening practices in institutional settings, which is increasingly a part of today's reality. Indeed, while blogs are replete with images of plants, which are adopted for their graphic qualities, they have also invaded art galleries, for artists appreciate their formal values as well as their reference to both a domesticated nature and a questioning of the decorative function of artworks.
Originally this project was based on exhibition photos (notably from the Marc Vaux and the Cahiers d'Art collections, which are conserved at the Kandinsky Library) from the 1940s to 1960s, an age of pre-standardized museum and exhibition design, when
decorative plants seemed to naturally punctuate exhibition galleries.
This show also takes into account the recent proliferation of indoor plants in contemporary artists' work. The images of plants and archival images of art exhibitions are thus mixed with images of recent works of art and specific projects by contemporaries, including Laura Aldridge, Ditte Gantriis, Hayley Tompkins, Travess Smalley and Pedro Wirz, who were invited to produce series of images that resonate with their usual art practice.
Vegetal Passion looks like a tame digital jungle in which all these images of a different nature are there to be discovered and ferreted out. The show will later change with the seasons, and like a winter garden we will follow its evolution for a year to observe the various proposed works by invited artists and the selections made by the two curators.
With special projects by Laura Aldridge, Ditte Gantriis, Hayley Tompkins, Travess Smalley and Pedro Wirz.
Featuring Darren Bader, Gabriele Beveridge, Simon & Tom Bloor, Marcel Broodthaers, Koenraad Dedobbeleer, Andreas Ervik, Ditte Gantriis, Pierre Huyghe, Jiří Kovanda, Margaret Lee, Tobias Madison,Mathieu Mercier, Jessee Moretti, Katja Novitskova, Oliver Osborne, Edgar Orlaineta, Nam June Paik, André Piguet, Mandla Reuter and Florian Slotawa.
Texts by Dorothée Dupuis and Aurélien Mole.
Curated by It’s Our Playground (Camille Le Houezec & Jocelyn Villemont).
Graphic design & development by Jérémy Muratet-Decker.
Created in 2010, It's Our Playground is an artist duo composed of artists Camille Le Houezec and Jocelyn Villemont. Their website http://www.itsourplayground.com serves as both a portfolio of their activity together and an artist-run space on the internet.
Royal Garden is made possible thanks to the generous support of Région Ile-de-France.
This fourth installment has been entrusted to Didier Rittener, who invited Federica Martini to join him. The installment envisions rivers as both motif and model, echoing an earlier exhibition at Crédac, Le Travail de Rivière (The Work of the River), which was mounted in 2009. Rivers wear away and make memory visible. Rivers includes works in the fine arts, sound, film and literature that form an open continuum, a series of possible imaginary actions.
At the outset of this project there is a list (reproduced on the following page). After taking part in Le Travail de Rivière, Rittener indeed began compiling a list of works in the visual arts, music and literature that refer to rivers, like some endless task of getting back to the beginning, the origin. This work of returning to, reviving and extending a past exhibition is fairly rare and joins up with the ideal, labyrinthine form of Royal Garden. Rittener opted for subjectivity over exhaustiveness and his list was brought to an end with the help of Federica Martini. It also became the invitation that was extended to those taking part in Royal Garden 4, the “riverbed,” as it were.
This list is also the first of twenty iterations of Royal Garden 4, whose dynamic interactive interface suggests a stream at the surface of which the various individual projects flow off in a random fashion.
Curators: Federica Martini and Didier Rittener
With the participation of:
Dove Allouche, Luc Aubort, Jean-Pierre Criqui, Carla Demierre, Gilles Furtwängler, Jérémie Gindre, Alain Huck, François Kohler, Claire Le Restif, Mark Luyten, Federica Martini, Damián Navarro, Jean-Paul Felley and Olivier Kaeser, Véronique Portal, Didier Rittener and Benjamin Stroun.
Graphic design and development: Jérémy Muratet-Decker
Royal Garden enjoys the generous support of Région Ile-de-France.
Didier Rittener is a winner of the international residency program of Ville de Paris / Institut Français aux Récollets.
Media partners: Zérodeux, le Quotidien de l’art, Artclair.com
Royal Garden 3 shows the memory of Crédac, through exhibitions that have been shot since 2003.
Without hierarchy or chronology, these films are stacked like bricks, a structure evoking the outer robe of the new Crédac, which has opened in September 2011 at the Manufacture des Oeillets.
Curator: Claire Le Restif
Associated Artist: Bruno Bellec
Graphic Design: Mathias Schweizer
Development: Lionel Dourt
Royal Garden is made possible through support from the Region Ile de France.
Etienne Bernard has set up a Royal Garden into Royal Garden by inviting A Constructed World, the Australian duo mid-graphic designers mid-artists who has themselves invited critics, historians, engaged in contemporary art, to comment on a series of pamphlets as " crisis, nationalism , stupidity, ignorance ...".
The authors invited by ACW are : Sébastien Pluot, François-Eudes Chanfrault, Hu Fang, Claire Fontaine, Justin Clemens, Elisabeth Lebovici, Claude Closky, Manuel Cirauqi, Heman Chong, Marie Muracciole.
Etienne Bernard also invited the artist Raphaël Zarka, and co-wrote a text on the Land Art with Antoine Marchand.
David Evrard develops his project " I was here but I disappear " during the overall season. His script is : " In 1977, Tony Manero, a young worker from the suburbs is going every Saturday to 2001 ODYSSEY just to show everyone that he is the living god of this light wooden floors, glass brick lighted from below following the impulses music .... "
Claire Le Restif invites Bruno Bellec to share his notebook to an architectural trip to Japan. The urban fabric, the web and his plastic work are mixed up. Isabelle Cornaro allows us to discover her Casts on the spot series differently
Mathieu Mercier reacts to different occurrences in the manner of an exquisite corpse offering after the Nationalism pamphlet, the image Flag on sale .
Pascal Beausse brings a poetic text Art is a pebble, Véronique Joumard offers a flip book, Peter Regli creates specifically a Reality Hacking No. 279. Silvana Reggiardo takes us for a walk on the Ed Rusha's parking photograhic series (echoing the proposal of Etienne Bernard and Antoine Marchand), finally Sabine Canivet gives us a presentation of a utopian architectural project of the 1970s, left into disuse in Ivry : the Riboulet towers built by the Atelier de Montrouge.
Mathias Schweizer has made two interventions and creates the visual noise project of Andrew Sharpley and Noël Akchopté .
Associated curators : Étienne Bernard, Claire Le Restif
Associated artist : David Evrard
Graphic design : Mathias Schweizer
Development : Lionel Dourt
Royal Garden enjoys the generous support of Région Ile-de-France.
Royal Garden 1 is a game with simple rules.
Each guest received a keyword. It is the starting point of production and the title of the posting proposal.
Royal Garden is not an encyclopaedic tool but a production area and proposals. The proposal does not necessarily constitute an illustrative manual of the keyword but a creative space, of thought and experimentation based on this imposed notion. So everyone chooses the way of expression he considers suitable to shape its response.
Bénédicte Ramade responded to " Bestiarium " Antoine Marchand for " Formalism " Christophe Catsaros for " Social Housing " Cedrick Eymenier for " Hanging Gardens in Ivry ," Pierre Vadi Baudevin with Francis and Christian Pahud for " Soundtrack " John Ballée Marc Antoine and Etienne Bernard Marchand for " Poster " Etienne Bernard for " Mister Hyde " and Claire Le Restif for " Dr. Jekyll ".
Participants to the season 1: Bénédicte Ramade (art critic), Antoine Marchand (art critic), Christopher Catsaros (architecture critic), artists Cedrick Eymenier, Pierre Vadi (with Francis Baudevin and Christian Pahud ), Jean-Marc Ballée ...
Associated curators : Étienne Bernard, Claire Le Restif
Graphic design : Mathias Schweizer
Development : Lionel Dourt
Royal Garden is made possible through support from the Region Ile de France.
