Press release
Cinémas
Exhibition from 22 January to 7 May 2006
Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Bernard Joisten,
Pierre Joseph, Ange Leccia,
Christelle Lheureux & Apichatpong Weerasethakul, M/M, Philippe Parreno, Philippe
Perrin,
Georges Rey, Thomas Struth
et Jean-Pierre Beauviala, Jean-Luc Godard, Vidéogazette.
This exhibition brings together artworks, films and documents from the
last thirty years.
Their common denominator is a concern with cinema (its technology, modes of production
and dissemination, and the world of film) and a geographical connection to Grenoble
and its region.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s Grenoble, and in particular the Villeneuve
quarter, was a recognised centre of social experiment. The production of filmed
images was one practical aspect of this. Out of a concern to democratise the
modes and conditions of filmmaking, and in parallel with his pursuit of an aesthetic
of the real, Jean-Pierre Beauviala created lenses and cameras for the Nouvelle
Vague. A resident of Villeneuve and comrade of Beauviala, Jean-Luc Godard shot Numéro
2 in his flat. Impelled by a critical vision of the economy and aesthetics
of industrial cinema, local activists created Vidéogazette (1972-1976),
which can be considered as one of the first neighbourhood television channels,
while others subsequently became involved with experimental cinema (MTK).
Some fifteen years later, young artists trained
at the art school by figures such as Ange Leccia, Jean-Luc Vilmouth and Georges
Rey took up the question of cinema, shifting it into the field of art in order
to explore such issues as modes of production by organising a series of collaborative
and collective undertakings.
This “particularity” is now characteristic of the functioning of
the contemporary scene. The Ann Lee project is based on an animated character,
whose rights have been bought by the initiating artists, each of whom has created
a film that adds to or extends those that already exist.