Download here the Visitor's guide. - Les Ateliers de Rennes

visitor's
guide

Summary
03 // Editorials
08 // Les Ateliers de Rennes,
a contemporary art biennial
11 // Les Prairies
15 // Collective exhibition
23 // Partners exhibition
31 // Les Prairies's artists
80 // La Caravane
80 // Publications
82 // Le Show de l’Ouest
84 // Practical informations
86 // Biennale OFF
97 // Map

The Prairies in Autumn
Bruno Caron, president of Art Norac
Three things are new for the third Ateliers de Rennes:
Editorials
- A new team. Lucidar, under the leadership of Anne Bonnin, Is responsible for the artistic
programme as well as practical organisation of the event.
- A new location. The main exhibitions will be shared between the new FRAC Bretagne
headquarters and the Newway Mabilais. The Newway Mabilais is a major architectural
landmark in the cityscape of Rennes.
- New dates. After two biennials in the spring, this edition will run from September to
December.
Some changes, but the spirit of the Ateliers de Rennes remains the same: a desire to bring
before a wide audience a meeting of art and business, the public sector (Greater Rennes) and
the private sector (Art Norac).
The Biennale will present the relationship between art and business, and cooperation
between the public and private sectors, particularly Rennes Métropole and Art Norac, to a
wide audience. In addition to this, several contemporary art galleries and organisations are
linked to the event through their exhibitions.
This year’s artistic programme is inspired by the multifaceted concept of the pioneer. Les
Prairies (the Prairies - title of this Biennale) are throwing open to exhibition visitors all the
potential of their vast expanses.
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8
Editorials
Les Ateliers de Rennes at the Frac Bretagne
Pierrick Massiot, President of Brittany Regional Council
As part of its cultural policy outlined in May 2011, Brittany Regional Council set itself the
objectives of creating a positive environment for the promotion of art within the region;
of developing the resources and services available to artists and people with projects;
and supporting artistic and cultural activities, the means for their dissemination, cultural
diversity, and intangible cultural heritage.
Under this policy, the Council supports organisations that produce and disseminate art,
encourage artists in their projects and bring art to the people of the region, typically by
hosting artists in residence and organising cultural activities.
I am therefore proud that the Region is supporting the Ateliers de Rennes - biennale d’art
contemporain in its efforts to form a bridge between artistic activities and the world of
business.
On 6 July 2012, the FRAC Bretagne collection (Brittany Regional Fund for Contemporary
Art) moved to a brand new building close to Aurelie Nemours's Alignement du XXIe siècle (21st
Century Alignment). The building was designed by Odile Decq and commissioned and financed
by the Region. It stands in the Beauregard neighbourhood of Rennes. I am also proud that
Les Ateliers de Rennes — biennale d’art contemporain have chosen this space for their third
edition.

Regional art, innovation, and dynamism
Daniel Delaveau, Mayor of Rennes, President of Rennes Métropole
Editorials
The 2008 and 2010 editions of the Ateliers de Rennes were held in the Couvent des Jacobins,
a monument that is part of Rennes’ cultural heritage and has since become a conference
centre. The third Ateliers de Rennes will be held in two other iconic buildings of the Rennes
cityscape. The first, the former regional telecommunications headquarters, is a remarkable
structure built in 1975 by the architect Louis Arretche. The second is the brand new Frac
Bretagne headquarters designed by Odile Decq, which stands close to the 72 pillars of
Aurelie Nemours’ Alignement du XXIe siècle, a recent and typical public commission in Rennes.
The Ateliers de Rennes welcomed 40,000 to 50,000 visitors to its first two editions and
quickly became a major event in the Rennes’ cultural calendar. The Biennial manages to
involve an audience that reaches beyond the usual public for modern art, and it mobilises
many of the cultural actors and cultural facilities of the region. The Musée des Beaux-arts,
the La Criée Centre d'Art Contemporain, and the Galerie 40mcube, for example, are all
hosting exhibitions this year. The Biennial is an event of international significance and it
greatly increases our region’s appeal by shining a spotlight on the vibrancy and richness of
the Rennes modern art scene.
The artistic programme developed for this year’s event springs directly from the urban,
economic, and social context of our metropolitan area. Its title, Les Prairies, inevitably
evokes the image of the pioneer. It is an image that accords with the ability to break with
convention, to invent, and to innovate which typifies the dynamic qualities of Rennes
Métropole, as much in business as in research, as in artistic creation - in all its forms.
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Les Ateliers de Rennes,
a contemporary art biennial
Art Norac invented a new biennale of contemporary art.
In 2005, Bruno Caron, founder and president of the Norac food group, involved the
company in a patronage policy devoted to contemporary art. Art Norac was formed
in line with the French Patronage law of 2003, in order to support and promote
contemporary creation and to make accessible to a wide public recent developments
in the field. Art Norac's approach to current artistic activities is to emphasise the
relationship between art and business, in particular through modern art projects and
exhibitions that stimulate exchange between the two spheres.
The Ateliers de Rennes - biennale d’art contemporain was created with this in mind.
This innovative, two-yearly, international event was founded in Rennes in 2008 in
partnership with the city of Rennes. It receives state funding from the French Ministry
of Culture through public commissions, from various local authorities (City of Rennes,
Rennes Métropole, Ille-et-Vilaine Regional Council and Brittany Regional Council), and
also support from the Brittany Regional Contemporary Art Fund.
Another original aspect of the Ateliers de Rennes is the way it is organised. The design
and management of the Biennale is entrusted to a curator and production team who are
recruited competitively for two biennales. Valeurs croisées, the 2008 Biennale, and Ce qui
vient, in 2010, for example, were organised by Art to Be at the Couvent des Jacobins.
The first two biennales attracted almost 100,000 visitors. The number of total visitors
increased by 15% in 2010 and there were many new visitors: 65% were attending the
event for the first time. For the most part, it was a regional audience. 80% were from
Brittany.
Bruno Caron and the Norac Group.
Founder and chairman of the food industry group Norac, Bruno Caron, was born in 1952. He is a graduate of the
HEC business school in Paris and a connoisseur and collector of modern art. Since 1992 he has encouraged Norac
to provide support for the creative arts through a company art collection. This includes work by post-war abstract
artists such as Aurelie Nemours, François Mollet, and Martin Barré, as well as the Supports/Surfaces group with
Jean-Pierre Pincemin and Claude Viallat. Over the past five years the collection has focused attention on emerging
artists, and it has expanded to include photography and new media.
Spurred on by the 1 August 2003 law on patronage, in 2005 Bruno Caron created Art Norac and the Ateliers de
Rennes - biennale d’art contemporain. In 2006, Bruno Caron became a member of the acquisitions panel of the
French National Contemporary Art Fund (FNAC). Norac was awarded Major Patron of Culture status in 2010.

The third edition
LUCIDAR DEVISING AND ORGANISING THE NEXT TWO EDITIONS.
Les Ateliers de Rennes, a contemporary art biennale
Entitled Les Prairies, the third edition of Ateliers de Rennes - biennale d’art
contemporain runs from 15 September to 9 December 2012 in different locations in and
around Rennes.
It consists of a themed collective exhibition, one-artist shows, a multidisciplinary
programme of events, publishing projects, and outreach educational projects.
The themed collective exhibition, Les Prairies, is divided between spaces in two
prestigious modern buildings: the Frac Bretagne headquarters building, designed by
Odile Decq and Benoit Cornette, and Newway Mabilais, the former Telecommunications
Centre, built in 1975 by Louis Arretche.
The one-artist exhibitions take place in partner locations: 40mcube, La Criée Centre
d’Art Contemporain, the PHAKT - Centre Culturel Colombier, Galerie Art & Essai,
Cabinet du Livre d’Artiste, and the Musée des Beaux-arts de Rennes.
The programme of the third Ateliers de Rennes – biennale d’art contemporain confirms
its international dimension. It brings together a significant number of artists and more
than 20 original artworks.
In January 2010 a second Ateliers de Rennes selection process was launched in order to choose an artistic
programme and a new team for the 2012 and 2014 editions of the Biennale. A panel of people from Art Norac and
other cultural organisations, along with professionals from the world of contemporary art, chose the winning team,
Lucidar.
Anne Bonnin is an art critic and curator. She has taught at two art schools, the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs
(ESAD), Strasbourg and then the École Supérieure d’Art de Clermont-Communauté. In 2009 she organised the
Pragmatismus & Romantismus group exhibition at the Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard (Paris), and Sauvagerie
domestique at the École Municipale des Beaux-arts/Galerie Édouard-Manet, (Gennevilliers).
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Les Prairies
Anne Bonnin, Director of Lucidar and curator of Ateliers de Rennes
The Spirit of New Beginnings
The artistic programme was proposed in response to a call which sought to explore the
relationship between art and business and art and the economy. The point of departure
of my thinking for this edition of the Biennale is the "enterprise", "entreprise" as the
French word for business or company, which I chose to interpret literally, in the first
instance. An enterprise is 'something undertaken' and it carries the idea of a beginning
(Jean-Jacques Rousseau begins his book The Confessions with the words "Je forme une
entreprise […]” - 'I am embarking on an enterprise'). This mode of action led me to an
empirical method, which shaped the way that I would work with the artists as well as
my approach to the context of the Biennale. It provided me with a concrete framework
for the artistic programme in that I was able to place it in a tangible setting: indeed I
considered Rennes and, in particular, the modern city as constructed since the 1960s.
I designed the programme around artists whose work I was familiar with, before
broadening the selection and researching other artists. The theme of conquest, which is
implicit in the thematic of 'prairies', draws on various sources and could be explained in
various ways: appropriating space for a purpose; inventing artistic ways of working with
and in a space – including that of the exhibition itself; exploring notions of expanded
fields and attitude, given that it is attitude that defines a space. What enterprises can be
embarked upon in the hyper-developed world, perceived and represented these days as
saturated?
A FIGURE OF CONQUEST
The figure of the frontiersman, or pioneer, is connected to the theme of conquest and
the prairie. The pioneer is an ambivalent character – a figure of conquest in history and
in legend, whose contradictory aspects need to be prised apart. In modern usage the
term has positive connotations. The pioneer is a precursor who clears a path for others
to follow, goes beyond the limits of knowledge and opens up new vistas in a field. The
historical image, on the other hand, is somewhat negative: the pioneer is a conqueror or
a colonizer and embodies the imperialistic tendencies of Western civilization.
The spirit of conquest is everywhere in the history of our pluralistic, scientific,
technological, political, and of course artistic modernity. The pioneer is a visionary,
a revolutionary, an inventor, and a builder who imagines and prepares a new world.
Operating in the vanguard of society, the pioneer embodies a kind of modern hero who
now belongs to the past. Like the word 'vanguard', 'pioneer' has military origins. In the
army, they were the front-line infantry or the sappers that cleared the way. In both cases
they were foot soldiers, at the bottom of the military hierarchy.
Three characteristics are encapsulated in the etymology of the word: position (spatial,
social, and intellectual), mobility, and a physical relationship with the environment.
Although a pioneer is, etymologically, a drudge, living a rudimentary, harsh life, the
etymology also includes an idea of movement. Its root is in pedonis, a derivation it
shares with “pedestrian”. This 'person in a state of movement' is, in other words,
displaced. Displaced to another country, another society, new world where they have no
place.
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Les Prairies
Thus, this figure constructed and defined in relation to spaces and territories is to be
understood in terms of an attitude towards space. Attitudes and way of life shape an
environment, either in an authoritarian mode or through a more intimate cooperative
interaction. Conquest is embodied by a variety of spatial positions that confront one
another: from the American pioneer to the post-colonial migrant. Botany also provides
a useful model for examining the relationship between the “individual” and the
environment: there are pioneering plants that prepare the earth for vegetables that will
follow later, while others colonize ecosystems and destroy their diversity.
A FLAT EXPANSE
The Prairie: a grassy expanse, where space and an open horizon spread out in all
directions. It is a common, shared, scenic, and poetic space and even a cinematic cliché
in Europe, and America. Natural or artificial prairies are home to a range of species, and
vary with the climate, latitude, or continent, having specific flora and fauna according to
where they are (the African savannah, the Russian steppes, or the Argentinean pampas,
for example). Prairies also belong to the built world.
Thus, the American prairie represents the experience of an uncontained expanse –
unlimited space and boundless horizons. And it is precisely this flat and monotonous
geography that Gertrude Stein transformed into a modern poetic experience. She laid it
bare and detached it from its origins. Flatness also characterizes the generic European
green prairie - geographical and poetic flatness. Monotony produces repetition.
Repetition is an act that is made real when carried out. It produces a poetics that begins
with action rather than with an ideal.
When we explore the horizontal, we discover the verticality of grass: “A flat expanse
seen horizontally from above; yet it is formed by a multitude of upright stems whose
verticality gives it its green quality” (Francis Ponge 1 ) . This takes us from the flat
expanse to the three dimensional expanse: a body occupies an area in space according
to the primary definition of the term. An expanse is not just surface area. A literal
interpretation turns space in on itself, and flatness leads to a simple vitality: “the
awareness that grass is vertical, the constant uprising of green that breathes life back
into us”.
Horizontality also gives rise to an egalitarian principle in relationships. They develop on
the same plane, which they do not in a vertical, hierarchical organization. Flatness is in
fact an attitude: a way of approaching the expanse as a grouping of things, things on an
equal footing, things like death. But it is a beginning that is beginning here.
Les Prairies literally expresses the flattening of spatial practices. A number of artworks
work with the expanse and recognize the importance of concrete spaces, of sites in all
their complexity and their history. "Occupying the ground” seems to be a concern for
artists who have brought their background of using sites to bear on their work (Katinka
Bock, Fernanda Gomes, and Guillaume Leblon are examples). Others decompose our
décor (Gyan Panchal), flatten depths (Dove Allouche, Irene Kopelman, Batia Suter), or
develop botanics of the soil (Loïs Weinberger).
1. Fr a n c i s Po n g e, La fa b r i q u e d u Pr é, in Œu v r e s c o m p l è t e s, Ga l l i m a r d, Bi B l i o t h è q u e d e la Pl é i a d e, 2002.

Les Prairies
Today’s artists adopt an objectivist or literalist attitude, taking a close look at reality
and objects, bringing the same attitude to both – something they are often criticized for.
Of course, you should have in mind that Manet was a master of flatness. Thus, “artists
reveal modern composition” (Gertrude Stein 2 ) : their point of departure is a constructed
world. Their work reflects the composition of the modern world: reality is composition.
To the American pioneer, the expanse represented opportunity in the form of a promised,
virgin land. But Indians lived on the prairie. Two spatial concepts collided: occupation
and habitation. To occupy is to take possession, to make maps and to create order; to
inhabit is to “see a latticework of lines rather than a continuous surface” (Tim Ingold 3 ) ,
an environment woven from lifelines - the straight line and the grid, or the curve These
paths have been traced by men and animals as they followed the lay of the land. The
Indian was there before the pioneer and showed him the paths, which he had been
shown by buffalos and other animals.
Les Prairies offers a paradoxical journey through flatness and concepts of flatness, or
platitude and platitudes to be closer to the French wording – the word "plat" in French
means flat. This would begin with a simple, elementary experience which would consist
in adopting an attitude of platitude regarding the world; flattening or leveling things,
considering them as equal, repeating them, remaking them, in the same way as the
artists, poets and writers who seek to understand the composition of the contemporary
world. The adventure would be to move towards things, to shift our viewpoint towards
them. In other words to deconstruct the “grammar of a place”, dissociate things from
their class or origin, experience them beyond their limits. In concrete terms this would
imply embracing reality in full. This proposal to praise platitude or flatness comes as
a possible antidote to the tyranny of context – context today is a world of connected
networks that are disconnected from anything concrete.
2. Ge r t r u d e St e i n, le c t u r e s e n Am é r i q u e, é d. Ch r i S t i a n Bo u r G o i S, 2011.
3. Tim in g o l d, un e b r è v e histoire d e s l i g n e s, Zo n e S Se n S i B l e S , 2011.
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Collective exhibition
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Les Prairies
The collective exhibition is organised into 5 thematic areas :
L’étendue
Le monde construit
« Je forme une entreprise »
Re : histoire
L’occupation des sols
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Newway
Mabilais
L’étendue
« Je forme une entreprise »
Re : histoire
Louis Arretche was one of the most prolific architects of France’s Trente
Glorieuses, a period of post-war boom, and he worked on a large number of
Public orders. From the end of the 60s to the end of the 70s, he played a role in
the construction of modern France, and contributed to the birth of a new Rennes:
the university campuses of Beaulieu (1956-1982) and Villejean (1963-1975), Liberté
(1961), the Telecommunications Centre (1975), and the Colombier neighbourhood
(1958-1987).
His Rennes developments in the 60s and 70s are representative, or you may
even say iconic, of a contemporary history of international architecture. In the
60s Arretche was a modernist, and in the 70s he became a futurist, and began
working with the concrete slab, which was typical of the period’s urbanism.
As an advisory architect to the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications, Louis
Arretche completed several orders, including the monumental construction that
stands out in the Rennes cityscape like a space ship landed in the middle of the
city. This futurist inspired building in the shape of a tripod covers more than
15,000m². The Telecommunications Centre’s function required the construction of
very high Hertzian antenna, to which the architect added a control platform in the
shape of a “flying saucer”.

Newway Mabilais
www.lesateliersderennes.fr
2, rue de la Mabilais
35 000 Rennes
Opening times Tuesday-Sunday
12pm to 7pm,
Closed Mondays
Mathieu K. Abonnenc
Gilles Aillaud
Dove Allouche
Collective exhibition
Tolia Astali & Dylan Peirce
Zbyněk Baladrán
Jesus Alberto Benitez
Katinka Bock
Adriana Bustos
Miriam Cahn
Luis Camnitzer
Duncan Campbell
Marieta Chirulescu
John Divola
Florian Fouché
Fernanda Gomes
Sofia Hultén
Vincent-Victor Jouffe
Kiluanji Kia Henda
Thomas Kilpper
Pierre Leguillon
Dóra Maurer
Helen Mirra
Uriel Orlow
Gyan Panchal
Jorge Satorre
Judith Scott
Yann Sérandour
Michael E. Smith
Batia Suter
Francisco Tropa
André Valensi
Marie Voignier
Jackie Winsor
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Frac
Bretagne
Le monde construit
L’occupation des sols
The Brittany Regional Contemporary Art Fund's (FRAC) collection contains over
4700 pieces from more than 500 artists, acquired since its creation in 1981. The
collection is made up of the major thematic groups - abstracts, the relationship
between art and landscape, ideas of art and history - as well as comprehensive
collections from Raymon Hains, Jacques Villeglé, Didier Vermeiren and Gilles
Mahé, amongst others. Frac Bretagne takes this collection across France and
abroad, and provides a full artistic agenda for the regional audience.
Funded by Brittany Regional Council, the Ministry of Culture and
Communication, DRAC Bretagne, and the City of Rennes, 2012 marks a significant
year in the organisation's development when it opens its doors to the public in
a new building designed by Odile Decq Benoît Cornette architects. Located in
Rennes, in the Beauregard area, the building is centred on vast wells of light
and houses three galleries, an archive, a café, and a library. With a 110 seat
auditorium as well as teaching and experimentation areas, Frac Bretagne will
offer a dynamic programme of temporary exhibitions from its own collection as
well as new art. This plethora of events are often organised in partnership with
its other events such as Ateliers de Rennes — biennale d’art contemporain.

Frac Bretagne
www.fracbretagne.fr
19, avenue André-Mussat
35 000 Rennes
Opening times Tuesday-Sunday
12pm to 7pm,
Closed Mondays
Collective exhibition
Bisan Hussam Abu-Eisheh
Gilles Aillaud
Michel Aubry
Zbyněk Baladrán
Katinka Bock
Miriam Cahn
René Daniëls
étienne-Martin
Lydia Gifford
Kees Goudzwaard
Vincent-Victor Jouffe
Kiluanji Kia Henda
Jan Kempenaers
Ian Kiaer
Irene Kopelman
Kitty Kraus
Guillaume Leblon
Jochen Lempert
Gyan Panchal
Neša Paripović
Batia Suter
Nasrin Tabatabai et Babak Afrassiabi
Francisco Tropa
André Valensi
Jackie Winsor
Želimir Žilnik
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Partners' exhibitions
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Partners exhibition
La Criée
contemporary art centre
La Criée is a voluntary contemporary
art centre that is actively dedicated to
researching, producing, presenting, and
distributing the work of innovative artists.
Every season, the art centre designs an
ambitious programme where artistic projects
of diverse aesthetics, all of them answering
the issues and objectives of varying methods
of exhibition, research, international
exposure, and sustainable regional
commitment. With its four creative platforms
(Art au centre — Prospectives — Des Rives
Continentales — Territoires en création), la
Criée exposes its audience to art through
exhibitions, resident artists, conventions,
seminars, workshops, meetings, as well as
the collective/individual publications.
La Criée centre d'art contemporain :
Pratchaya Phinthong (voir p. 64)
PRACTICAL INFORMATIONS :
La Criée, centre d’art contemporain
www.criee.org
Halles centrales
Place Honoré-Commeurec
35 000 Rennes
tél. 02 23 62 25 10
la-criee@ville-rennes.fr
Opening times Tuesday-Friday
12pm to 7pm,
Saturday and Sunday
2pm to 7pm,
Closed Mondays

Musée des beaux-arts
de Rennes
Rennes fine art museum is, like the majority of French museums,
the result of the revolution. Established in 1794, it contains
some of the Président de Robien's collection of curiosities. Its
collections were expanded over three centuries with additions
from Government, donations, and bequests. Since the beginning
of the 20th century, State and City support made in feasible
to introduce an acquisition policy that today showcases the
collections of 17th century French painting, with Georges de la
Tour's Nouveau né remaining the flagship piece.
Since the first Ateliers de Rennes — biennale d’art
contemporain, the museum received a Nicolas Floch' piece
in 2008, and expanded its collection of historic pieces with
work from Pieter Engels, Robert Filliou, and Giuseppe Pinot
Gallizio, while 2010 saw a Yona Friedman piece added to the
museum patio. As for each session of Ateliers de Rennes, the
museum will be linked to the project launched by the exhibition
commissioner, with a view to forging a link between modern
creativity and work that is already part of the history of art,
Western or otherwise.
Partners exhibition
Musée des beaux-arts :
Carla Filipe (voir p. 43)
Manfred Pernice (voir p. 63)
PRACTICAL INFORMATIONS :
Musée des beaux-arts de Rennes
www.mbar.org
20, quai Émile-Zola
35 000 Rennes
tél. 02 23 62 17 45
museebeauxarts@ville-rennes.fr
Opening times Wednesday-Sunday
10am to 12pm and 2pm to 6pm,
Tuesday 10am to 6pm,
Closed Mondays
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Partners exhibition
PHAKT
Centre Culturel Colombier
The Centre Culturel Colombier is developing
an urban cultural project that combines pieces
and methods in a cultural space. It does this
by setting out to present artwork and support
creativity and production, taking action locally,
within a community or network (residence,
projects, publications), by exploring adjacent
spaces (sound, the body), and promoting young
artists. These projects give rise to suggestions for
workshops, conferences, and relations with all
audiences for individual and collective encounters.
PHAKT Centre Culturel
Colombier :
André Guedes (voir p. 48)
PRACTICAL INFORMATIONS :
PHAKT
CENTRE CULTUREL COLOMBIER
www.phakt.fr
5, place des Colombes
35 000 Rennes
tél. 02 99 65 19 70
contact@phakt.fr
Opening times Monday-Saturday
1pm to 7.15 pm and on rdv.
Closed Sundays

40mcube
40mcube is an exhibition space and a bureau for modern art
projects. Its main purpose is artistic production, and close
collaboration with artists throughout the creative process is
sought: feasibility study, technical support, manufacturing, and
even the presentation of the work in individual exhibitions,
as well as their communication and mediation to the public.
This collaboration and production with the artists is caused
of followed by a reflection on current art that is seen in group
exhibitions and publications.
Several missions have been outlined: 40mcube — exhibition;
40mcube — publishing; and 40mcube AV that works with the
audiovisual sector and video artists, providing an international
art film agenda; 40mcube — a public space that works on
artistic projects taking place outside the exhibition area
with the Chantier public (Open studio) project and the New
commissioners mechanism (Fondation de France). 40m cube
occupies an industrial building and houses a 170m² exhibition
area, the Black Room dedicated to video, and a production
studio, on a 1100m 2 ² plot designed as an urban sculpture park.
Partners exhibition
40mcube :
Marion Verboom (voir p. 72)
Aglaia Konrad (voir p. 53)
PRACTICAL INFORMATIONS :
40mcube
www.40mcube.org
48, avenue Sergent-Maginot
35 000 Rennes
tél. 02 90 09 64 11
contact@40mcube.org
Opening times Tuesday to Saturday
2pm to 6 pm, and on rdv.
Closed Mondays
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Partners exhibition
Cabinet du livre d’artiste
Founded in the year 2000 by Leszek Brogowski,
Éditions Incertain Sens is a publication and research
programme based on an artist's book. The Cabinet
du livre de l'artiste has been running since 2006: a
specialist library, reading space, and exhibition area.
Their objective is to encourage the artist book as an
alternative way to make art, to support its production,
and to defend its presence in the cultures of art
and publishing. Born out of university, the Éditions
Incertain Sens and le Cabinet du livre d’artiste
stimulate research in aesthetics, documentation, and
the history or the artist's book, making the results
available to the full range of audiences: results
that include the publication bank (more than 2000
titles), exhibitions, conferences, as well as their
publications, especially Sans niveau ni mètre, and
the Journal du Cabinet du livre d’artiste.
Cabinet du livre d'artiste :
Mathieu K. Abonnenc, Pierre Leguillon,
Yann Sérandour (voir p. 67)
PRACTICAL INFORMATIONS :
Cabinet du livre d’artiste
www.incertain-sens.org
www.sans-niveau-ni-metre.org
Université Rennes 2 - Villejean
Place du Recteur-Henri-Le-Moal
35 000 Rennes
Bâtiment Érève
tél. 02 99 14 15 86
noury_aurelie@yahoo.fr
Opening times Tuesday to Friday
11am to 6pm, and on rdv.

Galerie Art & Essai
University Rennes 2's Art & Essai gallery is a space used
for exhibitions, training, research and debate, whose
teaching, artistic, and scientific objective is to support
discussions and public exposure. The gallery presents five
or six exhibitions every year with individual, collective,
and themed projects with a variety of commissioners. A
team of students manages the production, communication,
mediation, and documentation, and is appointed annually
to run the gallery. Part of Université Rennes 2; the Art &
Essai gallery promotes cross-disciplinary relationships
and regularly holds conferences, enters partnerships, and
publishes. The Art & Essai gallery is also a permanent
exhibition space that little by little is amassing an
infrastructure of a professional level. The exhibition
organised by the "Exhibition arts and professions" Masters
class builds on this year after year. Two professorresearchers
are responsible for managing the gallery:
Marion Hohlfeldt, reader in art history, and Denis Briand,
reader in visual arts.
Galerie Art & Essai :
Frédéric Moser & Philippe Schwinger (voir p. 59)
Partners exhibition
PRACTICAL INFORMATIONS :
galerie Art & Essai
www.univ-rennes2.fr
www.galerieartessai.fr
Université Rennes 2 - Villejean
Place du Recteur-Henri-Le-Moal
35 000 Rennes
tél. 02 99 14 11 42
galerie@uhb.fr
Opening times Tuesday to Friday
1pm to 6pm and on rdv.
31

Les Prairies's artists
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Les Prairies's artists
MATHIEU KLEYEBE ABONNENC
Movie poster for Africa Addio.
Directed by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, 1966. D.R.
Co-production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012,
Frac Bretagne,
Pavilion, Leeds,
Ecole des Beaux-Arts de
Nantes Métropole.
Mathieu Abonnenc explores the
colonial past. He works on figures
and events that official history has
suppressed. In Des corps entassés
('piled bodies'), the first part of a longterm
project, his ongoing research,
always underpinned by in-depth
study of precise situations, focuses
on copper (malachite), a material that
was one of the causes of the Katanga
War of Secession and, before that,
of the West's interest in the territory.
Abonnenc's film shows a dozen
Katanga crosses being melted down
in an English foundry and then cast
into a bar whose length corresponds
to that of an average human being.
For centuries (from the 10th century
up to Belgian colonisation in the 19th
century) these crosses were used as
currency in Central Africa. The brutal
act of appropriation represented in
the film is intended as an echo of
Belgian appropriation of the entire
reserves of Katanga crosses. The film
is accompanied by commentaries
relating several stories. Some of
the stories deal with phenomena of
cultural appropriation and the ensuing
violence; others are a narration of
aesthetic facts that bring out the
connotations of choice of material or
of production styles, in other words
their political and ethical significance.
No material is neutral. It implicates
and recounts human lives. Through
the story of a mineral, Abonnenc
reconstitutes an episode in the history
of capitalism and its mechanisms,
showing the effects of industrialisation
by European nations on colonised
nations and populations. The film is
presented along with several copper
bars in a scenography whose spatial
constraints denote authority.
A. B. tr. J.H.
Born in 1977 in Guyana (France),
lives and works in Paris (France).

BISAN HUSSAM ABU-EISHEH
Bayt Byoot “Playing House”, 2008-2011.
Photography : Nathalie Barki.
Collection Teixeira de Freitas, Lisbonne.
GILLES AILLAUD
Gilles Aillaud (1928-2005) is presented at the Ateliers de
Rennes in the company of artists of distinctly different
backgrounds. Aillaud is all too often associated with the
Narrative Figuration and New Figuration movements of the
1960s and 1970s in France. Although he is very well known
he deserves to be rediscovered. The zoo, an obsessive
theme, is at once a stage and a prison, which opens,
however, onto another place – that place from which the
animals have been cut off but which they carry within them.
The paintings are neither romantic nor sentimental, nor do
they reference the sublime; they are precisely enunciated
statements of dumb, living presences. In the animal
or landscape scenes, as in the drawings, the painting
becomes a living idea again that concentrates a series
of splits: between surface and depth, animal and man,
inside and outside. These arid and contradictory expanses,
the animals, the constricted spaces, are explorations
of registers of existence that put painting to the test of
reality in an introspective kind of art. Aillaud, as an heir of
modernity, closely examines questions of painting, surface,
materials, colour, figure and representation, yet does so
without abandoning reality. He pays close attention to ways
of inhabiting and occupying space. His paintings depict
worlds imprisoned by the human world but nonetheless
worlds with their own independent existence.
A. B. tr. J.H.
Born in 1928 in Paris (France), died in 2005.
Grille n°2, 1964. Collection Frac Bretagne.
Photography : Guy Jaumotte. © Adagp, Paris 2012.
Les Prairies's artists
Bisan Hussam Abu-Eisheh's work asserts itself by its size
and yet produces a paradoxical affect. His ten impeccable
white cabinets contain a heterogeneous collection of objects,
most of which are shattered, broken and damaged. But this
debris is topical. The objects were collected from the ruins of
houses destroyed by the Israeli government in a Palestinian
quarter of Jerusalem. Each one of them is arranged, labelled,
and precisely described on a piece of paper that states where
it came from, where it was picked up, the date of demolition
of the house and the number of people who lived in it. The
neutrality of this museographical device strips these objects
of all domestic reality. And yet they are no less attractive or
alive. Their origin is in real life and though they bear the
traces of destruction they also bear traces of existence. Ones
eyes are touching upon individual lives. Playing House – Bayt
Byoot achieves a documentary effect while at the same time
standing back from daily dramas that are abundantly reported
at international level. The short accompanying video echoes
this explosive political reality and also recalls the media
dimension. It was found on You Tube and is a loop of the
destruction of a Palestinian building in the Beit Hanina district.
The objects, having lost all ability to represent anything, seem
to have been brought in as a counterpoint to the continuous
film. They provide access to what current affairs reporting has
removed.
A. B. tr. J.H.
Born in 1985 in Jérusalem (Palestine), where he lives and works.
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Les Prairies's artists
DOVE ALLOUCHE
L’origine de la source I et II, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and galery Gaudel de Stampa, Paris.
The medium of Dove Allouche's images present a puzzle. It is not clear how
they were made nor, in fact, what they really show. The mystery arises from
the sometimes-obsolete techniques that he uses. For Les Prairies Allouche
has executed a series of ambrotypes, using a very old process, as well as two
drawings. Les Pétrifiantes explores some special caves that Allouche used as
natural 'dark rooms'. Just as stalactites and stalagmites are formed by slow
sedimentation of calcium carbonate, the photographic technique (ambrotype)
chosen by the artist for this series is a process of deposit and petrifaction. The
ambrotype was invented in the mid-19th century. One side of a glass plate is
covered with a thin layer of collodion, and dipped in a silver nitrate solution.
After exposure the plate is then developed and fixed. One side of the glass
negative is coated with black varnish to restore the image. The process itself
coincides with the subject of the image, i.e. matter being formed. The two
drawings were executed in pen and ink and graphite from a 1940 stereoscopic
plate. To give the impression of relief, the technique required a simultaneous,
slightly off-centre double shot. The first drawing faithfully reproduces the
left-hand view; the second reproduces the negative of the right-hand view. The
inversion gives a back and forth effect, an inverted depth in which the Origine de
la source appears to be alternately behind us and in front of us.
H. M. tr. J.H.
Born in 1972 in Paris (France), where he lives and works.
Co-production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012,
Frac Bretagne.

TOLIA ASTALI & DYLAN PEIRCE
Surface Value, 2012. Installation view. Courtesy of the artists. Photography : Achim Kukulies.
Les Prairies's artists
Astali & Peirce's architectonic installations mix constructed shapes and signs of destruction. Their
arrangements of modular elements echo the principle of modernist construction. White, partition-like
plates framed in black, often piled one above the other, are an authoritative statement of their function as
builders. These basic elements are currently used to configure cold settings in black, grey and white with
bureaucratic not to say totalitarian connotations. The two artists also create black and white collages of
found images, which they present on their partitions. These collages are of meaningful figures and elements,
whose referents, however, are lost in the recent and confused past. The connotations are more evocative than
explicit: "We construct the cliché that we would have liked to happen upon". Patterns arise from a contorted
sense of time. It is not clear whether they are the product of memory at work or of memory collapsing.
They become explicit in clear impressions. "The images are like skin that expels fragments towards the
surface". These fragmentary memory aids evoke the old-fashioned, conspiratorial atmosphere of the
communist world. The ambiguous signs lead the spectator to the threshold of understanding only to dash
expectations. In Les Prairies, a 'currency serpent' composed of cents of euro coins is also presented. Apart
from the explicit economic reference, it too arises from the paranoid mysteries of contemporary history.
A. B. tr. J.H.
Tolia Astali was born in 1974 in Tiflis (Georgia), Dylan Peirce was born in 1977 in Paris
(France), they live and work in Berlin (Germany).
Production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012.
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Les Prairies's artists
MICHEL AUBRY
Le Grand Jeu, 2011. Detail of the installation at the Galerie nationale de la Tapisserie
(Beauvais), exhibition Décor & Installations, 2011. Photography : Michel Aubry.
This large-scale wall installation is composed of familiar elements
from Michel Aubry's work: carpets, military uniforms, camouflage
fabric, pieces of furniture, a card table, a military map, and
Maoist propaganda objects. The carpets had various uses and
origins. There are Afghan rugs, mats from children's games and
from casinos. The themed assembly brings games and political
and war strategy together in an enormous jigsaw puzzle. The
composition is on a grand scale and accentuates the ornamental
qualities of the decontextualised objects. Aubry works on the
patterns, their referents and their connotations, making semantic
switches between war and play and creating a theatre on the
wall to emphasise the old alliance between the two. The patterns
become signs whose meanings are mutually affected by contact
with one another. The twin notions of ornament and politics recall
the great frescoes of 15th and 16th century Italian cities. The work is
like a ceremonial, ritual object, redolent of an altar cloth, standing
horizontal objects vertically. Le Grand Jeu operates in (at least)
two ways. It eulogises and at the same time pillories a particular
political iconography, and ideology, dealing with the end of the
great communist empires and evoking their apotheosis. This is a
post-communist fresco, that associates Afghanistan, the USSR and
China with casinos, and pokes fun at political fetishism.
A. B. tr. J.H.
Born in 1959 in Saint-Hilaire-du-Harcouët (France), lives and works
in Paris (France).

ZBYNěK BALADRáN
When in 1735. Courtesy galery Hunt Kastner, Prague.
JESUS ALBERTO BENITEZ
Jesus Alberto Benitez is greatly influenced by music, particularly
by Death Metal and experimental electro-acoustic music. He
thinks of photographs as different possible versions of the same
piece of music, whence the importance of concrete activity in the
studio as a constant means of assimilating outside contingencies
and including production mistakes. He likes to imitate some
of the effects of these, such as, for example, creased paper,
wrinkles on the canvas, crushed fabric, traces of the scanner,
and uneven margins. Using photosensitive paper is typical of his
attention to the role of chance. He works with rolls of paper that
have already been affected by the light, sometimes letting the
paper deteriorate further in his studio. He also uses spray-paint
as a material that 'projects' in the same indeterminate way. It
escapes the control of the artist without defining a precise line.
The importance of the material quality of his supports prevents
any distinction between the object and the image. Wade Guyton,
Walead Beshty, Sigmar Polke and photographs of sculptures by
Constantin Brancusi are important references for Benitez. The
ephemeral nature of the materials he uses has influenced his
interpretation of Physics, in particular theories of the origins and
constitution of matter and space-time.
F. O. tr J. H.
Born in 1978 in Valencia (Venezuela), lives and works in Lyon
(France).
Les Prairies's artists
Baladrán is interested in theoretical and cognitive
models and their translation into visual terms and
locates his ideas in the digital age. "Freshly created
images also become ruins. The rate at which this
happens is proportionate to the rate at which new
images are created. This is the space-time relationship
of culture and human history". Zbynek ̌
Baladrán's work
takes the form of a retro-futurist atlas and suggests the
evaporation of content and meaning, while offering
a new interpretation of representation and scientific
classification systems. When in 1735 refers to the
industrial revolution and the concealment of the
human and social consequences of the development
of machines. In Model for the Universe, Baladrán
enunciates, at the same time as he designs them,
successive hypotheses for "an exhibition as model of
the universe". He places artistic rules and systems of
scientific or social organisation on an equal footing,
on the theory that any object can become a model for
the universe and, consequently, for an exhibition. His
modular composition Assemblage Against Essence
interrogates our relationships with knowledge and
cognitive models. Baladrán demonstrates the arbitrary
and reversible nature of these models.
M. C. tr. J. tH.
Born in 1973 in Prague (Czech Republic) where he lives
and works.
Untitled, 2012. Courtesy galery Frank Elbaz, Paris.
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Les Prairies's artists
KATINKA BOCK
Le Grand Bleu (elle), 2012. Courtesy galery Jocelyn Wolff, Paris. Photography : Chloé Philip.
Katinka Bock's sculptures are a combination of material and formal, process based and
constructed. The materials she uses determine the nature of the works. She favours
natural materials such as earth, wood, iron, copper, leather and sand – sometimes
unexpected materials such as a lemon. She works with their intrinsic physical
properties subjecting them to the random effects of change produced, for example,
by baking. The artwork is an interplay of opposing and stabilising forces, a stasis – a
harmonious arrangement that acts as a moment of clarity and suspense in the comings
and goings of the world. Katinka Bock is exhibiting two new productions. One of them
was realised in a process-based context in association with the Lycée Bréquigny, a
Rennes school housed in a predominantly horizontal Brutalist building designed by
Louis Arretche. Bock installed an area of unbaked clay covered with a red carpet in the
main thoroughfare of the school, a two hundred and twenty metre long corridor used
every day by fifteen hundred people. The installation itself assumed in its significance
the artifice of art. The resulting sculpture confounded expectations. It did not register
any identifiable footprints – they were rendered indistinct by the ensuing processes,
which included firing. Katinka Bock rejects the causalist approach and dismisses
any urge to fetishise imprints. Hers is a material story which encompasses a human
experience within a wider process. Through it she asserts a position at one with
concrete reality – a reality whose infinite complexity is revealed through her art.
A. B. tr. J.H.
Born in 1976 in Francfort-sur-le-Main (Germany), lives and works in Paris (France).
Production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012.

ADRIANA BUSTOS
Antropología de la mula, 2007. Courtesy of the artist and galery
Ignacio Liprandi Arte Contemporáneo, Buenos Aires.
MIRIAM CAHN
Miriam Cahn says that she never knows, when she begins a
canvas, whether the figure is going to be a human or an animal.
She maintains that there is a profound relationship between
the species. If she paints a man with female attributes, or a
woman-monkey, or plant-humans, or body-landscapes, she is
not attempting to paint a real person but the memory or the
feelings of one. Her vegetal, human, or animal portraits, as
she calls them, are ambiguous, complex, vulnerable, and they
throb with subconscious life. Her human bodies are often naked
and androgynous, with very marked, stylised eyes and sexual
organs. The fully frontal nature of the figures emphasises the
presence of the subject. In fact, it could perhaps be said that
her subject is an excess of subject, the subject being excess
– excess beside and beyond itself, beyond identity, beyond
class, beyond sex, beyond gender, and yet hyper-sexualised
and hypersensitive. Much influenced by Rothko, she has
developed a brilliant and luminous texture, which she obtains
by applying a very thin layer of paint onto the canvas, leaving
no brush marks. Cahn attaches great importance to the way her
works are presented, likening it to an installation, improvised
on the spot and quickly executed in the exhibition space. The
arrangement of the works reflects the frenetic cadence of
performance. The choice of works presented in the 2012 edition
of the Ateliers de Rennes is an orchestrated assembly inspired
by the painter's own rhythms.
F. O. tr. J.H.
Born in 1949 in Bâle (Switzerland), lives and works around Bâle
and Bergell area (Switzerland).
Les Prairies's artists
Réédition
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012.
Adriana Bustos's works establish subtle parallels between
Latin-American history and contemporary events there; they
often reveal unexpected connections. Of particular interest
is the corpus of drawings, videos, and photographs devoted
to horses, which she presents as evidence of economic
changes in the country. The animal that was once a symbol
of pride and prosperity in the Argentinean countryside
became associated, during the economic and social crisis
of the beginning of the 21st century, with the precarious
existence of the cartoneros as they eked a living, hauling
their collections of cardboard and paper around the streets
of Buenos Aires. In an extension of her research, Adriana
Bustos worked on the history of colonial conquests and their
apparent connections with drug smuggling. She discovered
that the roads out of Córdoba, where she now lives, that
have been used for more than a century by human 'mules'
(people who smuggle cocaine capsules in their stomach) to
transport narcotics, are the same roads that, from the 16th to
the 18th century, were trodden by mules exporting precious
metals. The piece presented here puns on the meanings of
the word 'mule' and superimposes the routes taken by drug
smugglers on the map of the colonial roads.
F. O. tr. J.H.
Born in 1963 in Bahia Blanca (Argentina), lives and
works in Córdoba (Argentina).
ZORN, 5./6.1.04. Courtesy of the artist and galery Jocelyn Wolff,
Paris.
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Les Prairies's artists
LUIS CAMNITZER
Two Parallel Lines, 1976. Collection 49 Nord 6 Est – Frac Lorraine, Metz.
Photography : Frac Lorraine.
DUNCAN CAMPBELL
Duncan Campbell maintains that documentary is
a fictional form and he interrogates the nature of
it in works in which archives and old images are
reformulated within narratives to show how much of
what they contain is imagined. One of Campbell's
specialities is portraits of emblematic characters from
20th century history. Make it new John (2009) is the
story of John DeLorean and his invention, the DeLorean
DMC-12, a sports car. DeLorean was a talented engineer
and a vice-president of General Motors, which he left
in 1973 in order to start his own company. He received
subsidies from the British government to build a factory
at Dunmurry in the suburbs of Belfast. Being located
on the front line between Catholics and Protestants, it
was hoped that the factory would help reduce social
and political conflict by providing work for members
of both communities. But the DeLorean was not much
of a success and, almost immediately, John DeLorean
ran into financial problems. The factory, which had
a workforce of two thousand, closed in 1982, having
produced no more than nine thousand cars. Ironically
enough, the car became a symbol of the American myth
and achieved iconic status in the film trilogy Back to
the Future.
M. C. tr. J.H.
Born in 1972 in Dublin (Ireland), lives and works in
Glasgow (Scotland).
Two horizontal, parallel lines on a wall. These poetic
cum philosophical fragments, which are both footnotes
and the formalization of ideas at work, evoke by turn
the horizon, a frontier, exclusion, a trajectory and also
flatness and death. Two lines, parallel in space but also
in their essence, lines that will never meet – words and
things. An irreducible distance between the visual and
the discursive, between the artwork and discourse about
it. This hybrid piece reflects all the singularity of the
Uruguayan born, US immigrant artist, Luis Camnitzer.
There is a fundamental tension between the poetic and
the conceptual. And yet, this piece is not folded in on itself
with purely artistic concerns; it is far more open to the
world at large. Beyond its subtle interrogation of matters
of representation, there are, as always with Camnitzer,
hidden and profound signs to be unearthed about the
links between art and politics. The work displays certain
clandestine, autobiographical motifs such as frontiers,
cross-cultures, and imprisonment. The straight line is by
nature an inevitable separation, a shape from which there
is no escape. The work has particular resonance in the life
of this artist who has long been an exile against his will
in the United States, and someone very affected by the
dictatorships of the 1970s.
tr. J.H.
Born in 1939 in Lübeck (Germany), lives and works in
New-York (United States).
Make it new John, 2009. Courtesy of the artist.
Photography : Seamus Harahan.

MARIETA CHIRULESCU
Stop, 2010. Courtesy of the artist and galery Micky Schubert,
Berlin.
RENé DANIëLS
René Daniëls's meteoric career took place for the
most part between 1977 and 1987, coinciding with the
time when the Neo-expressionist movement came to
dominate the art market. In 1987 Daniëls was affected
by a brain haemorrhage and did not paint again until
2006. In 1984 an invasive pattern emerged. It was a
perspective space with two or three walls, usually
without floor or ceiling. This enigmatic, ambivalent
shape often took the form of a bow tie – it is worn by
the artist in a drawing entitled A Room above the
Pacific; it is a pictogram satirising the bourgeois
atmosphere of exhibition openings; but in Battle
for the Twentieth Century, the scarlet bow tie is
pierced with yellow openings – windows, or perhaps
monochrome paintings, which transform the bow
tie into an exhibition space. It is an alluring mise en
abyme: from the painting in the exhibition space to
the exhibition within the space of the painting. At that
same time, the British artists Michael Baldwin and
Mel Ramsden from Art & Language created a similarly
depopulated embedding of concepts in their series
Incidents in a Museum. Daniëls's diptych Title Evening
sabotages perspective in a similar kind of way. His
target is once again the fiction of the painting and its
exhibition, the vacuity of too focused and abstracted
a view.
H. M. tr. J.H.
Born in 1950 in Eindhoven (Netherlands), where he
lives and works.
Les Prairies's artists
Marieta Chirulescu has managed to escape the usual schism that
divides the digital sect from the sacrosanct chapel of traditional
photography. Her pictorial ecumenicalism embraces digital
and analogue, painting and photography, Photoshop and the
photocopier. Her works, which can be likened to filters or veils
or colour projections, often have the effect of a nebulous mist
whose depth rises above the surface and whose borders are
unclear. It can be difficult to make out the grain because the effect
of digital enlargement is so similar to the weave of a painted
canvas. It is also hard to differentiate between the margins and
the edges. They are superimposed in a stratigraphy that defies
interpretation. Chirulescu's taste for interference – a forgotten
scrap of scotch tape here, a scratch there, dust, reflections,
misalignment, and so on – is perhaps a product of her Romanian
childhood, spent reading badly printed books. Images from
the internet, screenshots, photos taken by her father during the
dictatorship, and illustrations from the old Romanian journal Arte
have all been treated in a way that apes the style of archival and
bureaucratic processes. Chirulescu apparently works towards an
exhaustiveness which would explain the washed out, overexposed
tones of anaemic images. Her use of layering software is done
to achieve impalpable tactile effects – the aim is to remove the
presence not the virtual nature of the image.
H. M. tr. J.H.
Born in 1974 in Sibiu (Romania), lives and works in Berlin
(Germany).
Painting on the Bullfight, 1985. Courtesy Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht.
Photography : Peter Cox. © Adagp, Paris 2012.
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Les Prairies's artists
JOHN DIVOLA
Vandalism, 1974. Courtesy galery Laura Bartlett, London.
éTIENNE-MARTIN
French sculptor Étienne-Martin, who worked in the tradition of
Brancusi, was also influenced by Marcel Duchamp. He worked
with bronze, or fabric and rubber, and had a predilection for
wood. He maintained that "the interior determines form". The
"interior" could be an inner life or a family home, just as it
could be the nature of a piece of wood that already contained
the form. This spiritual attitude towards materials animated
his work and necessarily entailed a kind of introspection that
could be looked on as an initiatory journey deep into personal
history. In the 1950s, delving back into early memories,
especially of his childhood home in Loriol in South-East
France, he began making Demeures, a series of architectural
sculptures. These pieces along with his famous Manteau
en tissue, belong to what might be called nostalgic art. La
Marelle (hopscotch) is an assemblythat uses the ground plan
of the Loriol house. The graphics are basic shapes (sun, circle,
rectangle, heart), numbers and inscriptions. It is part of the
Abécédaire (Alphabet Primer). "The Abécédaire met a crucially
important need, which was to connect various different things
together, to find a link between these figures. The Abécédaire
is a chronological route from the closed and secret world of the
original alcove out to the terrace, which is open to the outside
world. It is also a kind of game of goose" (Etienne-Martin). This
original art, which transforms biography into universal artistic
experience, transcends all opposition between modern and
archaic, figurative and abstraction.
tr. J.H.
Born in 1913 in Loriol (France), died in 1995.
A major photographer on the California art scene, John
Divola began his career in the 1970s with the series
San Fernando Valley (1971-1973), which documented the
life of the inhabitants, as well as the architecture, of a
depressed Los Angeles suburb. The series Vandalism,
executed between 1974 and 1975, was a founding work
in his conceptual vocabulary. He took black and white
photographs of the interiors of abandoned houses, after
first reworking the spaces – for the most part with silver
aerosol paint or by moving various objects. His first ideas
for this series came while he was developing photos of
silver-grey gas bottles. The link between the silver of the
photographic paper and the colour of the bottles gave him
the idea of extending the effects of the photo and the flash
to this colour. Divola started taking paint aerosols into
abandoned houses in Los Angeles and painting at random
the walls, ceilings, floors and various objects he found
there. The three-dimensional space of these interiors is
flattened by the two-dimensional pictorial pattern that
comes to the surface of the image. Vandalism established
a conceptual link between painting and photography in a
direct line with Californian artists like Ed Ruscha.
F. O. tr. J.H.
Born in 1949 in Los Angeles (United States), where he
lives and works.
La Marelle, 1963. Collection Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain
de Strasbourg. Photography : M. Bertola. © Adagp, Paris 2012.

CARLA FILIPE
Blue drawings, 2006-2008. Courtesy of the artist, galery Nuno Centeno, Porto, and galery
Graça Brandão, Lisbon.
Les Prairies's artists
Carla Filipe's close mixture of
personal and collective history
explores the way memory functions.
She requisitions drawing, objects,
posters, photographs, banners,
and other forms into her work
and these all take on meaning
as part of her installations. In
common with a number of artists
in the exhibition Prairies, her art
involves documentary work. In her
case, it is closely associated with
biography and sociology. In the
collective exhibition, worm-eaten
books are a literal demonstration of
tattered knowledge, using a double
symmetric pattern evocative of the
Rorschach psychological test. The
two works on show at the Rennes
Musée des Beaux-arts are similarly
emblematic of Filipe's approach.
Ex –voto : dimanche, cimetière
anonyme et mémorial ferroviaire
consists of sixty-eight ex-votos
dedicated by the artist to railway
workers. This granddaughter of
a level-crossing keeper brought
old family stories to bear on her
ideas about the railway as a
concrete metaphor for the advent
of capitalism and population
movement. Her installation Archive
sourde-muette was created for the
Prague contemporary art centre
Tranzit. It incorporates all kinds
of different documents and is a
subjective, historical archive that
materialises temporal, conceptual
and ideological movements – from
the 1980s to the present, from
communism to post-communism,
childhood to adulthood, Portugal
to the Czech Republic, from West
to East.
tr. J.H.
Born in 1973 in Vila Nova da
Barquinha (Portugal), lives and
works in Porto (Portugal).
retrouvez cette artiste au Musée des beaux-arts de Rennes
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Les Prairies's artists
FLORIAN FOUCHé
L’école du village, Musée du paysan roumain, Bucarest, 2010-2012. Courtesy of the artist.
In 2007, Florian Fouché went to Târgu Jiu in Romania to study the war memorial
erected there by Brancusi in 1938. The ensemble comprises three sculptures: the Table
of Silence, the Gate of the Kiss and the Column of the Infinite. It is a condensation
of formal vocabulary that links the pared down simplicity of his plan to archaism.
Fouché evidently found the same balance at the Museum of the Romanian Peasant
in Bucharest, which was refurbished in 1990 under the direction of the painter Horia
Bernea, whose anthropologist father was a specialist in peasant culture. On the theory
that sympathetic organisation of the objects could act as explanation in itself, Bernea
and his team transformed obsessive didacticism into a gently pedagogic approach
that they hoped would give rise to a "poetics of museography". Out of context, the
vernacular objects are rendered exotic by the occasionally somewhat Modernist
devices used to exhibit them – pedestals, cabinets, mannequins, hanging rails. In 2010
Florian Fouché took photographs of some of these arrangements. Twenty-eight of the
one hundred and twenty images are presented here between glass plates, on shelves.
With its sensitive treatment of fragmentary views, exploiting depth and transparency,
the arrangement is partly inspired by the display cabinets designed by Bernea. For
the Ateliers de Rennes Florian Fouché continued his research, in the summer of 2012,
with the team at the museum. He is writing about this extraordinary ensemble whose
experiments in scenography tally in some respects with the intuitive syncretism of his
own approach.
H. M. tr. J.H.
Born in 1983 in Lyon, lives and works in Paris (France).
Production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012.

LYDIA GIFFORD
Dell, 2012. Installation view. Courtesy galery Laura Bartlett, London.
Les Prairies's artists
Lydia Gifford has developed a wider approach to painting, bordering on the
immaterial. Traces of paint, pencil or dust, spread about the exhibition space, are
suggestive of acts and intentions left purposely uncompleted. "My work attempts
to create an impression of beginning", she has explained. Dell (2012), which was
created for her one-woman show at the David Roberts Art Foundation, London, is
an installation in situ of long wooden planks arranged in parallel on the floor or
propped up on breezeblocks and covered in places with a layer of charcoal ash.
The physical impact of moving them is left visible, as are the curves of the sagging
boards (Dell in the sense of 'valley') and the traces of ash that, stencil-like, reveal
the negative space of the structure. After being sieved, the dust is spread in layers,
which gives a sense of weight and density in utter contrast to the natural properties
of so light a material. In reworking the installation for the Ateliers de Rennes, Lydia
Gifford produces a silent choreography that connects the architecture of the site to
the subtle balance between orchestrated and improvised movement.
F. O. tr. J.H.
Born in 1979 in Cheltenham (Great-Britain), lives and works in London
(Great-Britain).
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Les Prairies's artists
FERNANDA GOMES
Untitled, 2012. Courtesy galery Luisa Strina, São Paulo, and galery Emmanuel Hervé, Paris.
Photography : Fernanda Gomes.
Fernanda Gomes's art is distinguished by a particular way of occupying a space
and spreading into it, and by its sensitive interaction with a given environment.
Her productions are linked to places where things happen – exhibition spaces, their
surroundings, the street or the home. Her work is replete with paradox. It is spacious
yet her minuscule materials are sometimes barely visible. It is scattered yet a discreet
grid underlies her composition. Her atonal palette – sand, white, grey – merges into the
surroundings. At the same time details which are compositions in themselves stand out:
a glass of water emphasises a groove in the floor; a gold needle stuck in the wall reaches
out to you and indicates the wall. These multifarious elements are gleaned from all over
the place – the way an animal ferrets about for provisions. Gomez calls them "things":
everyday objects, pieces of furniture, glasses (sometimes full of water), mirrors, coins,
twigs, newspapers, pieces of string, magnets, scraps and fragments. Some (needles, dust,
hair, cigarette ends) are tiny. Gomez examines the architecture to make it her material.
Space is composed of invisible matter; insignificant aspects (rough edges, corners,
windows) become signs and typical shapes. She treats the void as architectonic space,
and dust as a colour. Her compositions are an inner journey to the centre of a constructed
world. In keeping with the Brazilian Neo-Concretists her art is both formal and political.
Through its abstract language it gives rise to the sensitive and intelligible experience of
an invisible, abandoned, poverty-stricken reality at the outer edge of one's gaze.
tr. J.H.
Born in 1960 in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), where she lives and works.
Production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012.

KEES GOUDZWAARD
Lightweight, 2009. Courtesy galery Zeno X, Anvers.
Photography : Peter Cox.
SOFIA HULTéN
Since moving to Berlin at the beginning of the present
century, Sofia Hultén has busily honed her recycling
impulses. She hunts out ready-made and used objects.
The objects that she works on are often themselves
objects from the toolbox and provide a first clue to the
conceptual nature of her work, namely her reflexivity.
The video Past Particles – The Found Toolbox (2010) is
a meticulous inventory. She lists more than a hundred
pieces of ironmongery from a found toolbox. They
are all individually filmed, each fragment appearing
different but giving no clue as to its use or function. The
Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment is the name of an
installation in which nine metal door and window grids
have been sawn into three horizontal portions and each
third then soldered on to two other sections to create nine
new, unequal window bays, hung at regular intervals.
When looked at along the axis of their alignment, the
grids seem to reappear as they overlay one another.
This simultaneously multiple and unitary view is a
metaphor for the alternating processes of expansion and
contraction described in the self-help manual that has
given its name to the installation.
H. M. tr. J.H.
Born in 1972 in Stockholm (Suede), lives and works in
Berlin (Germany).
Les Prairies's artists
Kees Goudzwaard's abstract painting has been fostered by various
different pictorial influences – from Dutch landscape painting to German
Expressionism by way of American Color Field Painting. He uses full-size
paper mock-ups to experiment with various compositions before beginning
to paint on his canvas. During the 1990s, he made a radical change. He
realized that the subject of his work was not the painted picture but
the mock-up image, which preserves intact the moments of doubt and
hesitation in his thought process. Like a musical score, it allows him to
arrange and superimpose layers of coloured paper or sheets of transparent
plastic which he fixes with adhesive tape – generally on the wall of
his studio. In a second phase, he paints an exact copy of the original
mock-up without, however, taking into account the reliefs and shadows.
Goudzwaard insists that his work is not an illusionist trick or a trompel'oeil
but simply the substitution of one reality for another. He replaces the
reality of his painting with the reality of his process. The canvas is both the
mental representation of a picture to come and a completely finished work
in its own right. Goudzwaard is exhibiting several pictures here, each of
which addresses a particular aesthetic question. Untitled (2000) is from a
period when he was thinking about Dutch Modernism. He was taken with
the idea of Modernism as a promise of something possible, a kind of silent
euphoria, and was attempting to give it a more private dimension. "This
picture is a statement of a mental space private enough for somebody to
want to inhabit it and feel at home in it."
F. O. tr. J.H
Born 1958 in Utrecht (Netherlands), lives and works around
Anvers (Belgium) and Reusel (Netherlands).
Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment, 2011. Installation view.
Collection Konstmuseum of Malmö.
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Les Prairies's artists
ANDRé GUEDES
Nova Árgea, 2012. Photography : Vera Keel.
André Guedes's plastic work is based on extensive documentary research and underpinned
by an anthropological reflection on the influence of human activity in the design of spaces. On
being invited to the PHAKT Centre Culturel Colombier as part of the 2012 Ateliers de Rennes,
Guedes created a project that is an oblique response to the architecture and the social aspects
of the Colombier area. His installation Nova Árgea includes a slideshow of staged photographs
depicting members of a present-day, fictional community in a real-life situation. It creates a
visual and text-based narrative in which poet Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão, urbanist Gaston
Bardet and artist Clara Batalha all take part. The narrative was inspired by the story of an
agricultural co-operative called A Comunal in Árgea, a Portuguese village. This was during
the period known as PREC (Processo Revolucionário Em Curso, or 'On-Going Revolutionary
Process') after Portugal's Carnation Revolution of April 1974. The founders of this co-op were
urban intellectuals who hoped to get closer to the rural population and to fire them with
"cultural dynamism". To attain their revolutionary ideal of fraternity between the social classes,
they attempted to set up an agricultural project with the peasants and the rural proletariat,
based on exchange of knowledge and a fair contribution from everyone involved. This idealist
experiment, updated and re-interpreted in Nova Árgea, was contemporary with the creation of
the Colombier area. However, although Colombier may have embodied aspirations of modern
comfort, it was perhaps less concerned with social and cultural emancipation than Árgea. The
architect's vision reflected an economic model less imbued with idealism.
tr. J.H.
Born in 1971 in Lisbon (Portugal), where he lives and works.
Co-Production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012,
PHAKT Centre Culturel Colombier.
retrouvez cet artiste au PHAKT, Centre Culturel Colombier

VINCENT-VICTOR JOUFFE
Prairies Saint-Martin, Rennes, décembre 2000. Photography : Vincent-Victor Jouffe.
After studying drawing at the Paris École Nationale Supérieure des Beauxarts,
Vincent-Victor Jouffe took up photography and filmmaking. After moving
to the village of Saint-Méloir-des-Bois in the north of Brittany, he began to
create a corpus of images related to the region. This is where he grew up and
his work was guided by his thoughts about the area. He is much influenced
by the teachings of art historian, critic and exhibition curator Jean-François
Chevrier, who invited him to his seminar "Des territoires (On localities)". Jouffe's
photography combines several parameters – artistic, theoretical, historical, social
and also biographical. His knowledge of Art History and the use of archives and
documentation have given him the analytic distance needed to work in his native
region on this personal and artistic experiment. His works are rooted in reality
and are a social chronicle as much as they are landscape photography with a
very present and discreetly autobiographical human dimension. In addition to
his magnificent set of polaroids of the flooded Prairies Saint-Martin (a large,
relatively uncultivated park by a canal in Rennes, which flooded in 2000), Jouffe
has created a new photo-film for the 2012 Ateliers de Rennes. It is a montage of
slides from his huge stock of photos of agricultural shows (comices in French).
COMICE is a compilation of images from different years but it tells the story of a
typical day at one of these now rare events.
tr. J.H.
Born in 1968 in Dinan (France), lives and works
in Saint-Méloir-des-Bois (France).
Les Prairies's artists
Production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012.
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Les Prairies's artists
JAN KEMPENAERS
Spomenik #1 (Podgaric), 2007. Collection Mu.ZEE, Ostende.
© Adagp, Paris 2012.
KILUANJI KIA HENDA
Kiluanji Kia Henda seeks to convey, at a remove, the history of his
country, destroyed by civil war and colonisation, and to construct
fictions that explore as much the past as the future. Lunda In The
Sky with Diamonds I represents an Angolan landscape destroyed
by diamond mining, an economy which the Angolans themselves
miss out on even though it is they who extract the stones from
the mine. Balumuka (Ambush) shows an open-air transit zone
in Luanda, the Angolan capital. It is a graveyard for old objects,
machines, and fragments of old monuments. The fortuitous
juxtapositions re-enact historical scenes: colonial heroes rub
shoulders with Angolan sovereigns and military weapons. These
epic, rather grotesque scenes are evidence of the difficulty the
country has in preserving its heritage. Redefining The Power
III (with Miguel Prince) is a theatrical style staging of our
relationship with history and mocks the importance attached to
monuments and statuary in Angolan public space. Taking empty
colonial-era pedestals from which the statues were removed at
the time of Angolan Independence, the artist invited performers
to occupy the place vacated by the coloniser. These improvised
heroes, formerly colonised people, adopted comically satirical
attitudes of power. Although Kiluanji Kia Henda has realized an
ephemeral dream, it is above all a call for the possibility of a new
way of remembering.
C. P. tr. J. H.
Born in 1979 in Luanda (Angola), where he lives and works.
Jan Kempenaers is best known for his large-scale
panoramas of industrial and urban landscapes in
Europe, the United States and Japan. In his fascination
for the hybrid nature of today's landscapes, Kempenaers
interrogates the 18th century notion of the 'picturesque'.
His series Spomenik (2007) is an attempt to capture
what remains of the monuments (spomenik) that were
erected under Tito in the 1960s and 70s to commemorate
communist resistance to Nazi occupation. These
monumental sculptures with their powerfully expressive
geometric forms are to be found in strategic and
symbolic locations. They are constructed in long-lasting
architectural materials like concrete, steel and granite.
After the confusion of the ethnic wars that followed the
break-up of Yugoslavia many of these formally diverse,
Brutalist monuments were destroyed, while others
were simply abandoned. These strange memorials are
baffling to recent generations. Stripped of the trappings
of social and political ideology as well as of their
commemorative function, they raise the question as to
how far, after "the end of history", an 'object' can accede
to the status of pure sculpture in its own right.
N. L. tr. J.H
Born in 1968 in Anvers (Belgium), lives and works in
Gand (Belgium).
Balumuka – Ambush, 2010. Courtesy of the artist and Galeria
Fonti, Naples.

IAN KIAER
Melnikov project, black facade, 2011. Vue de l'installation.
Courtesy of the artist and galery Alison Jacques, London, and Kunstverein of Francfort.
Les Prairies's artists
Ian Kiaer's art is developing around the concept of projects, using utopian architecture
and its creators as a starting point. In keeping with the architectural model, his
installations are placed at floor level and on the walls. Their scale as models is also that
of the project. The fragile materials, in spite of their ordinariness (packaging, plastic,
cardboard, etc.) and their faded colours, situate his artworks at that intermediary stage
between idea, ideal and execution. His is a plastic art of composition and detail and
of the sublime colour of everyday objects in an imaginative vision, summoning up the
painting of an age that depicted reality as a dream. Ian Kiaer's pictorial and sculptural
art occupies the same dimension as Utopia: the introspective and imaginary time
dimension of potentialities in which reality is prepared. For Les Prairies Kiaer looked at
the former telecommunications centre that Louis Arretche completed in 1972, an imposing
building that exudes utter confidence in Modernist architectural style – a style, it has to
be said, that already appeared somewhat dated in the seventies, as the Retro-futuristic
aesthetic of the building indicates. The scale of the building, unlike the potential and
introspective nature of "paper architecture", provoked the artist into a power struggle
leading him to reflect on other modes of production. By acquiring and using some of the
original windows, Kiaer was able to rethink the architectural project as a proposition and
a ruin, which he interpreted, using the architect's archives, in his own language through
paintings, models and projections.
A. B. tr. J.H.
Born in 1971 in London (Great-Britain), where he lives and works.
Production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012.
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Les Prairies's artists
THOMAS KILPPER
John Heartfield and Silvio Berlusconi, 2009. Collection Kadist Art Foundation, Paris.
© Adagp, Paris 2012.
Thomas Kilpper, the German artist and activist living in Berlin,
is well known for his installations, drawings and monumental
woodcarvings that he does on an urban architectural scale. He
takes over buildings due for demolition and carves directly into the
floor, which he uses as a matrix for making in situ prints on canvas
or paper. John Heartfield and Silvio Berlusconi provocatively
associates a portrait of Berlusconi, the former Italian head of
government and media mogul, with a fragment of a photomontage
by John Heartfield (1891-1968), in which this great German
manipulator of images and critic of the Nazi regime appears with a
pair of scissors. In Willi Brandt, Guenther Guillaume and Dietrich
Sperling, goes back to the intrigues of the Cold War. Guenter
Guillaume was an East German spy who had infiltrated the office
of the Chancellor of the Federal German Republic. Here he seems
to be whispering false information into Chancellor Willi Brandt's
ear. The third man, Dietrich Sperling, was at that time a minister in
Brandt's government. These two works are part of the series State
of Control, a monumental fresco in which the artist experimented
for the first time with engraving on a linoleum floor in a Berlin
building. In this case it was the former headquarters of the East
German political police, the STASI.
F. O. tr. J. H.
Born in 1956 in Stuttgart (Germany), lives and works in Berlin
(Germany).

AGLAIA KONRAD
Concrete & Samples III Carrara, 2010. Courtesy Production Auguste Orts. © Adagp, Paris 2012.
Les Prairies's artists
Concrete & Samples I, II et III is a series of films by Aglaia Konrad devoted to two structures and a natural
site greatly modified by humans. The first film in the trilogy explores the Church of the Most Holy Trinity
in Vienna. The building was designed by the sculptor Fritz Wotruba and looks like a monumental abstract
sculpture. It is a cubist arrangement of a hundred and fifty-two asymmetrically placed concrete blocks.
Concrete & Samples II Blockhaus presents the Church of Saint-Bernadette-du-Banlay in Nevers, designed
by Claude Parent and Paul Virilio. It is a monolithic and enigmatic building that from the outside looks like
a defensive bunker in raw concrete. The interior space gets its dynamic from two diagonal slopes. The last
film in the trilogy, Concrete & Samples III Carrara was shot in the famous marble quarry at Carrara. This
constantly evolving landscape comes across as something sculptural, decorated with temporary structures
and references to art history. Though none of the three films has a commentary, they all offer a subjective
view of these structures and this site. The camera seems to stand in for the gaze of a visitor, in this case,
the artist's. It is therefore from her point of view, literally and metaphorically, that we discover these places,
and her point of view that gives unity to the three films. Aglaia Konrad has chosen to bring the three sites
together in one series – two modern structures in raw concrete and the natural place of extraction of a noble
and traditional material for sculpture – and she has tereated them as sculptures in their own right.
A. L. tr. J. H.
Born in 1960 in Salzbourg (Austria), lives and works in Brussels (Belgium).
retrouvez cette artiste à 40mcube
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Les Prairies's artists
IRENE KOPELMAN
This is a potato, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.
This project received support from fondation Botin, Santander.
KITTY KRAUS
The work presented in Les Prairies is emblematic of Kitty Kraus's
interest in the processes and almost alchemical transformations
associated with post-minimalist art, Arte Povera, and the artists
Joseph Beuys and Robert Smithson. Her lamps encased in blocks of
ink-stained ice deal with the disappearance of form. The initial form
– cubic, compact and minimal – looks like an explosive device. Once
the lamp is switched on, the ice inevitably melts and the ink spreads
across the floor to create an abstract landscape, an amorphous black
stain. The creation of what appears to be an ordinary mechanical
accident is in fact a very precise business. In the process the artist
gives a new take on recurrent motifs in the art history of the mid
to late 20th century – stains, cubes, light. A sombre beauty is born
from these changes of form and in it, physical and metaphysical
destruction coincide. Nevertheless, although Kraus emphasises the
sensitive aspect of these works, with their materials (glass, ice, light,
mirrors) evoking the fragility and transience of things, she avoids the
trap of elegance and remains on a knife-edge.
K. A. F. tr. J. H.
Born in 1976 in Heidelberg (Germany), lives and works in Berlin
(Germany).
Irene Kopelman is fascinated by the riches of natural
history museums and also by the domestication
of landscape peculiar to old Europe. Some of the
curiosities she likes to explore certainly border on the
fantastic: those rare molluscs with an anti-clockwise
shell, for example, or the asymmetric property
known as chirality which in various branches of
science characterises systems whose mirror images
cannot be superposed. Hands and orchids fall into
this category. However, in order to counteract the
abstraction of surrealist data, Irene Kopelman makes
drawings. In systems biology, as in minimal and
conceptual art which she occasionally cites, rules
govern the generation of shapes. The principles of
sameness and difference are determining factors
as they make it possible to detect the occurrence of
identities, as distinct from the repetition of identical
entities. Kopelman has stated that one of the principle
problematic themes of her work concerns the
"dynamics of difference and repetition: how things
which are almost identical at first sight prove also
to be different if we look at them long enough and
carefully enough".
H. M. tr. J. H.
Born in 1976 in Cordobá (Argentina), lives and works
in Amsterdam (Netherlands).
Untitled, 2008. Collection Kadist Art Foundation, Paris.

GUILLAUME LEBLON
Les Prairies's artists
Sketch for Portrait de l’homme politique en sportif occasionnel, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and galery Jocelyn Wolff, Paris.
Guillaume Leblon's sculptures and films develop different natural or domestic landscapes
rife with phenomena of submersion, burial, or disappearance. And yet, the passage of time
does not sound a metaphysical alarm for this artist, but rather astonishment at seeing that
traces endure whereas things disappear. The studio is a place of transit, sometimes of
retention. The architectural and furniture elements of his sculptures preserve the memory
of the bodies whose scale, size and spirit they contain. Since 2009 Leblon has developed a
family of sculptures designed like collages into which fragmentary human presences are
invited. They recall, amongst other references, the fragmentation of ancient ruins. They
are assemblies built around either the whole or a part of a piece of furniture that acts as
a structuring device. Elements from the studio are grafted on to this – the side of a desk, a
pharmacy display cabinet, for example – some of his pieces preserve the horizontality of the
reclining body. Others suggest a vertical stature against which the body can be measured.
For Les Prairies, Guillaume Leblon has created a sculpture that is also a potential ladder,
or even a perch. The wall bars in the centre suggest the possibility of climbing but stability
is threatened by the unusual way in which it is secured – anchored to the ground by
brass cables. Two moulded ceramic legs suspended by the ankles mark a suspension of
movement. All the same, the object suggests exercise for the body: press-ups, stretching, and
limbering up.
H. M. tr. J. H.
Born in 1971 in Lille (France), lives and works in Paris (France).
Production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012.
Avec le soutien de
l'entreprise Crézé.
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Les Prairies's artists
PIERRE LEGUILLON
Prelinger Drawings, 2012. Prelinger Library, San Francisco, 2011.
Courtesy of the artist and galery Motive, Amsterdam.
Pierre Leguillon makes images out of images from his own collection. Prelinger
Drawings is a new installation that combines two different artistic registers:
a rectangular space made from an assemblage of various printed fabrics, chosen
for their patterns, printing techniques and their provenance (Scandinavian, African,
French or Japanese) on the one hand and, along with that, a set of pencil drawings,
frottages of book covers from the Prelinger Library in San Francisco. This private
library, devoted to the history of the United States, was created by Megan and Rick
Prelinger and opened to the public in 2004. It contains a vast quantity of books, both
scientific and non-scientific, a number of which are obsolete, on all kinds of subjects.
It amounts to an encyclopaedic and vernacular storehouse of North American history.
The diversity of the books on all kinds of subjects, whose covers the artist selected,
reflects a pragmatic ideology. The patterns of the fabrics summon up a history of
modern art and design while at the same time suggesting economic globalisation
through the multifarious labels of origin left apparent on the edges of the fabric.
Fabrics and drawings are overlaid to create a palimpsest in which the transparency
of the printed materials is emphasised by the luminosity of the venue. This highly
colourful arrangement is also like a theatre of memory where frottage has something
in common with a ritual gesture – an act of reining in perpetual movement, where
the visual aspect is more important than the text and circulation prevails over
transmission.
A. B. tr. J. H.
Born in 1969 in Nogent-sur-Marne (France), lives and works in Paris (France).
Production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012.

JOCHEN LEMPERT
Foraging gulls indicate the height of flying insects, 2005.
Courtesy of the artist and galery ProjecteSD, Barcelona.
DÓRA MAURER
The principle of perpetual motion lies at the heart of
Dóra Maurer's approach. Some of her works can be
read in one direction or the other and the repetition,
folding, loops or spirals involved, indicate reversal
processes in line with the principles of engraving.
In the late 1960s, she added photography and film
to her activities, both as documentary vestiges and
also as autonomous sequences of basic gestures such
as walking, turning the head, or shaking hands. In
her film Timing (1973/1980), Maurer folds a piece of
white linen that is in proportion to the dimensions
of the image as well as the span of her arms. As the
folding proceeds, the cloth disappears to reveal a dark
background. In the video Proportions (1979) it is, as it
were, her own body that she folds. After measuring
out her own height on a strip of paper, she folds it
over and divides it into halves and then quarters. In
a strange choreography she treads on it, rests her
elbows on it, and then kisses it. The measuring scale's
abstract calibrations no longer seem to correspond
to the original, nor to any hidden yardstick. The
subversive nature of this anthropometric endeavour
flies in the face of standardization.
H. M. tr. J. H.
Born in 1937 in Budapest (Hungary) where she lives
and works.
Les Prairies's artists
With his background as an ornithologist on research
vessels in the North Sea, Jochen Lempert brings a trained
scientific eye to his photographic subjects. This does not,
however, prevent him from injecting them with a fair dose
of wide-eyed humour or melancholy. Lempert develops
his own black and white prints, which he invariably
leaves unframed. Their disarming simplicity makes them
objects in their own right, leading him occasionally to
complicate their status as images by making it impossible
to decide whether they are figurative or abstractions. The
sheer variety of work displayed here gives us an insight
into Lempert's style. Stadtstrukturen, which represents a
couple of pigeons poking about in a deserted town centre,
is an ironic parody of anthropomorphism. Fly shows a
single fly in sharp focus against a blurred hedge. It is as
if Lempert had frozen this most banal of insects in full
flight in order to contemplate the miracle of life. Consider
also the very recent Untitled (Hoopoe, Delhi): a single
Hoopoe is escaping shyly into the grainy, grey-white that
covers almost the entire surface of the photograph. The
tremendous pathos of this photo comes from the bird's
obvious need to get away, which seems as urgent as, in
the end, it is incomprehensible.
C. S. tr. J.H.
Born in 1958 in Moers (Germany), lives and works in
Hambourg (Germany).
Proportions, 1979. Production Hedendaagse Kunst, Utrecht.
Courtesy of the artist.
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Les Prairies's artists
HELEN MIRRA
Hourly Directional Field Notation, Arizonan Sonoran Desert, 6 January, 2012, 2012.
Photography of the artist. Courtesy of the artist and galery Nelson-Freeman, Paris.
Co-production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012,
Frac Bretagne.
Avec le soutien des Verrières –
résidences-ateliers de Pont-Aven et
d'Itinéraire Bis – Galerie du Dourven.
Walking is an integral part of Helen Mirra's method of production. It structures her choice of
process. The works realised for Les Prairies result from a process begun in 2010 which she
has used from exhibition to exhibition and from country to country, the idea being that at
each exhibition the fruits of an earlier residence elsewhere are displayed while she works
on new stuff while in residence. Thus, from one exhibition to another a nomadic oeuvre
gets created indirectly, with titles such as Field Recordings and Field Notation that reflect
her outdoor habits. The works displayed at Rennes were produced in the winter of 2012
in Arizona; those that she has produced in Brittany during the summer of 2012, between
Brocéliande, Pont-Aven and Trédrez-Locquémeau, will be presented in Tokyo. Hourly
Directional Field Notation, Arizonan Sonoran Desert are the fruit of a week's walking in
the Sonoran Desert after the manner of the early American pioneers. On every one of her
daily perambulations Helen Mirra made a print on the way. She would cover a stone she
found on the ground with green ink and apply it to a length of raw linen which she kept in
her back-pack, folded like a map. This direct 'positive' print method recalls the Japanese
pictorial technique known as gyotaku, which consists of covering a freshly caught fish
with ink in order to make a realistic rubbing of it. Mirra's marks are "neither photographic
nor descriptive", making it impossible to pin them down geographically. They are pure
materiality, translating the reciprocal imprint left by the artist on the landscape and by the
landscape on the artist.
H. M. tr. J.H.
Born in 1970 in New York (United States), lives and works in Cambridge
(United States).

FRéDéRIC MOSER &
PHILIPPE SCHWINGER
Alles wird wieder gut, 2006. Courtesy of the artists, galery Jocelyn Wolff, Paris, and galery KOW, Berlin.
Les Prairies's artists
Frédéric Moser and Philippe Schwinger's video installations lie somewhere between theatre,
performance and film. They show the confrontation of figures involved in reconstructions,
discussions and accusations. The event being discussed is never shown; it is defined after
collective debate. Par les villages is a collection of five films, one of which entitled Tumeur
has never been seen before. The title is a reference to a recurrent social structure in Moser
and Schwinger's work, that of the village – a closed cell torn between withdrawal and
exodus, community spirit and egocentricity, and exposed to new types of insecurity like the
industrialisation of agriculture, redundancy, unemployment and so on. The title Alles wird wieder
gut – Everything's going to be alright – (2006), references Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's
film Tout va bien (1972). It transposes the parents' picket line to a village in former East Germany,
where it has continued since the collapse of the Wall, acting as a mythology for children faced
with unemployment and torn between joint action, the urge to get away and the desire to stay.
The teenagers in Cupidon grandit – Cupid grows up – (2011) are not actors but amateurs filmed
acting in a role-play in which the cards they drew imposed on them an identity to be masked or
unmasked – villager or werewolf. Donnerstag (2006) shows a young agricultural worker caught up
in the repetitive work of machine milking. Acting Facts (2003) is a man acting out stories told by
soldiers guilty of inhuman conduct in what appear to be Vietnamese villages.
H. M. tr. J.H.
Born respectively in 1966 and 1961 in Saint-Imier (Switzerland),
they lives and works in Brussels (Belgium).
Co-Production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012,
Galerie Art & Essai.
retrouvez ces artistes à la galerie Art & Essai
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Les Prairies's artists
URIEL ORLOW
Remnants of the Future, 2010. Diffusion LUX. Courtesy of the artist.
Nasrin Tabatabai (born in 1961 in Iran) and Babak Afrassiabi (born in
1969 in Iran) had founded PAGES in 2004 in Rotterdam (Netherlands)
where they live nad work.
Uriel Orlow is concerned with the way collective
memory exists and the forms and figures that embody
it in reality (personalities, places, writings, or images).
In his film Remnants of the Future (2010), he explores
the ruins of Soviet ideology. The public housing estate
at Mush in the north of Armenia, was built in 1988 at the
behest of Mikhail Gorbachev in order to house people
displaced from the Stipak earthquake zone. But after
the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 the project was
left in the air. The estate, an idealistic communal living
project, is now inhabited only by temporary settlers and
scavengers who strip scrap metal out of the buildings.
This ghost city fits Foucault's notion of heterotopia,
insofar as, never having been finished, it does not
figure on any map – a phantasmagorical place even
though it exists. Mush is named after a city in Anatolia
in Eastern Turkey. It is the subject of Plans for the Past
(2012), the second part of Remnants of the Future. The
city of Mush in Anatolia also seems to have been
suspended in time. It was the scene of the massacre
of the Armenians, the first recognized genocide in
20th century history, although denied and disputed by
successive Turkish governments.
M. C. tr J. H.
Bron in 1973 in Zurich (Switzerland), lives and works
around London and Zurich.
NASRIN TABATABAI & BABAK AFRASSIABI (PAGES)
Through their research projects and their bilingual Anglo-Persian
journal, Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi explore the historical,
political, and cultural conditions for the production of art in the specific
context of Iran. Two Archives (2011) combines two different sources: the
archives of the British Petroleum company (BP) and the collection of
modern Western art from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Teheran.
BP was in Iran from 1901 until 1951, when oil was nationalised and it
lost its monopoly. The BP archives document the history of the first oildrilling
operations in the Middle East. In 1970, when oil exports were at
their highest, the Teheran Museum of Contemporary Art held the largest
collection in the Middle East, thanks to money from an oil company. In
the exhibition space, an assembly of two oil derricks and a copy of the
two open halves of a refinery ventilation housing stand as an echo of
modern sculpture. The video is a loop that overlays a shot of the workers
leaving the workplace with the same shot in reverse. Going home thus
becomes a return to the refinery. A replica of a photo album documents
the architecture of company housing, while a series of letters retraces a
correspondence about making a flattering and ideological documentary
about the company. The pictures are inspired by photographs in the
museum's reserves. The combination of these two archives makes
manifest the unfinished nature of Iran's modernity, which has been
partly fashioned by the oil economy since the early 20th century.
F. O. tr. J. H.
Wooden Oil Derrick Superimposed with Steel Oil
Derrick, Two Archives, 2011. Installation view, Badischer
Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (Allemagne) 2011.
Photography : Stephan Baumann.

GYAN PANCHAL
Dhrso, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and galery Frank Elbaz, Paris.
Les Prairies's artists
Production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012.
Gyan Panchal works like a
geologist, probing the materials
of our everyday environment,
exploring their production cycle and
their origin in order to reveal their
story. He works with raw, mainly
oil-derived industrial materials
such as polymers or plastics
which he combines with natural
powders like graphite and coal. The
forms he creates from industrial
packaging situate his sculpture in
the realm of concrete abstraction.
It is delicate work rooted in organic
and economic history in which the
sedimentation of the materials is not
hidden. For Les Prairies Panchal
created a different sculpture for
each of the two venues of the
collective exhibition. Although they
are autonomous works, the two
sculptures are conceived as two
moments of the same work – two
projections into a space that was to
be filled. The first stands in a 1970s
building in the course of renovation,
a rough predominantly concrete
place, with glass walls giving on
to the outside world. The sculpture
leans against a pillar, hugging the
landscape. There are three sheets of
Styrofoam, curved and covered with
red chalk dust. This is a material
that architects use for their models
and it suits architectonic forms and
the notion of spatial projection. In
the "white cube" exhibition areas
of FRAC Bretagne, Panchal has
designed something different: long,
crumpled isolation sheets hang on
the wall down to the floor, projecting
a layered, undulating relief into the
space. Gyan Panchal's conceptual
and material exploration lightens
the spatial constraints, freeing itself
from gravity
A. B. tr. J.H.
Born in 1973 in Paris (France),
where he lives and works.
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Les Prairies's artists
NEŠA PARIPOVIĆ
N.P., 1977. Collection Kontakt, Vienne. Courtesy de l'artiste.
N.P. 1977, 1977. Courtesy of the artist and galery Kontakt, Vienne.
Collection Erste Group and Erste Foundation, Vienne.
Neša Paripovicćis ´
an important figure in Serbian conceptual art of
the 1970s. Much influenced by the critical theory of the Praxis school
(who maintained that Leninism and Stalinism did not respect Marxist
orthodoxy but had hi-jacked it in the interests of party ideology), he
was the heir to an avant-garde modernity. At the time he executed
a number of works in which he made great efforts to deconstruct the
identity of the painter, or even the artist. The first film in the trilogy NP
– his initials – is a significant example. Standing in front of the camera
with his face painted he launches into a silent series of gestures
in mockery of his status as an artist. In NP77, the film presented
in Les Prairies, he strides quickly through Belgrade following an
imaginary straight line, jumping over barriers, climbing over roofs,
crossing a motorway, going through courtyards and gardens. Although
conspicuously political, the performance also has an aesthetic
and ironic side to it that smacks of dandyism – the artist wears a
fashionable suit and walks nonchalantly along in polished shoes.
Nevertheless, he embodies a conceptual attitude. His gesture defies
the architecture of the city which he flattens as if it were a surface
for him to draw a line on with his body. This critical and playful
situationist gesture openly flouts the rules.
M. C. tr. J. H.
Born in 1942 in Belgrade (Serbia), where he lives and works.

MANFRED PERNICE
Tiefengarage, 2008. installation view, Culturgest, Lisbonne.
Courtesy of the artist and galery Neu, Berlin. Photography : DMF, 2008.
Les Prairies's artists
Manfred Pernice's installation-like
sculptures call to mind pieces of
domestic or urban furniture. His
architectonic sculptures use cheap
materials such as cardboard,
plywood, chipboard, or concrete.
Certain aspects are designed to
emphasise their modest, even dull
finish – the persistence here of an
aesthetic, created in retrospect, in
East Germany. In 2008 he created
his installation Tiefengarage for
the spaces of the Lisbon Culturgest.
The German title was invented by
Pernice. The adjective tief affixed
to the word garage is intended
to evoke the psychoanalytical
notion of Tiefenpsychologie (depth
psychology). The Tiefengarage is
painted grey to half-way up and
filled with wooden benches and
stools, objects and photographs
and is strongly suggestive of the
aesthetics of underground places
reserved for things not being
used – car park, garage, or cellar.
Psychology is not missing from
this space; its inaccessibility might
symbolise a buried or repressed
subconscious. The frames on the
wall enclose images that are
discernible in spite of the weak
light. They are reproductions of
illustrations and photographs from
the archives of a Czechoslovakian
art student in West Berlin in the
1960s. This uniformly black and
white iconographic assembly
translates the weaving together
of a collective and an individual
subconscious.
H. M. tr. J. H.
Born in 1963 in Hildesheim
(Germany), lives and works in Berlin
(Germany).
retrouvez cet artiste au Musée des beaux-arts de Rennes
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66
Les Prairies's artists
PRATCHAYA PHINTHONG
sleeping sickness, 2012. Courtesy galery gb agency, Paris. Photography : Pratchaya Phinthong.
Pratchaya Phinthong's works are all part of a project and can come in appreciably
different forms. They are based on processes of displacement and connect
diametrically opposed situations which, without his intervention, would be unaware of
one another. At the same time they bring into the open a particular social, geographic
and economic situation. Sleeping sickness is the extension of a project on sleeping
sickness that Pratchaya Phinthong began for Documenta 13 in Kassel. Sleeping
sickness is a fatal disease mainly affecting people in sub-Saharan Africa. Facing
the prototype of a fly-trap, designed in dialogue with researchers and scientists, and
looking like a small tent made of blue fabric, a monitor broadcasts the sound track of a
sleeping sickness awareness documentary. As the images have been removed from the
film, only the script in sub-title form and a drawing by Thai illustrator Vichai Malikul
provide an actual representation of the illness. At the same time as the work went on
show, 500 blue tents were set up in Zambia, Ethiopia and Tanzania as a grassroots test
of the effectiveness of the traps. Throughout the Biennial the local people are invited to
send in images of the traps in their actual context for display at La Criée. With sleeping
sickness, Pratchaya Phinthong is presenting the outcome of a research and creation
process that takes an artistic venture into the domain of social welfare.
tr. J.H.
Born in 1974 in Ubon Ratchathani (Thailand), lives and works in
Bangkok (Thailand).
Co-Production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012,
La Criée, centre d'art contemporain.
retrouvez cet artiste à La Criée

JORGE SATORRE
Divine Truth. Evidentiary Piaxtla. (Détail). 2008-2010.
Courtesy of the artist.
JUDITH SCOTT
Judith Scott suffered from Down's syndrome and
was a deaf-mute. Her sculptures are objects
wrapped in layers of wool. At a specialist artistic
institution for the handicapped that she attended,
she developed a style of art based on assemblage.
She would tie up objects she had found, covering
them with coloured threads or fabric ribbons.
Under the thick wrapping, the objects more often
than not lost their original shape, and yet they
could be called neither shapeless nor misshapen.
These sculptures can evoke cocoons or dolls,
knots, eggs, physical growths or ritual objects
with magic powers. Once the object was covered
to her satisfaction, Scott would lose interest in it,
put it to one side and pass on to the next work,
where she would repeat the process. Her approach
to art seems to have been one of gleaning,
covering, knotting and concealing. What her
aesthetic or symbolic intentions were cannot be
ascertained. Archive images of her at work reveal
the precision of her gestures and her choices
of materials, colours and textures, and also the
physical nature of the artistic act – the importance
to her of the tactile aspect.
M. C. tr. J.H.
Born in 1943 in Cincinnati (United States), died
in 2005.
Les Prairies's artists
Inspired by micro-history as formulated by the historian Carlo
Ginzburg, Jorge Satorre works from facts and stories about the
facts. He weaves interpretations around what is for him an
idée fixe, not to say obsession, namely that a fact once it has
been related becomes the story. In his oeuvre theory is mapped
perfectly onto practice. The methods he uses involve careful
thought about transmission and interpretation without, however,
being illustrative. The final installation often combines drawings
and documents and constitutes a prism with several facets:
documentary, historical, fictional and personal. The spatial
mechanism forms a mnemonic experience at both collective
and individual level. Jorge Satorre is engaged in micro-history
while simultaneously producing meta-stories. The concept of
point of view is actually incorporated into the production process
itself. This is evidenced in Divine Truth, for example, where he
invited several different people to make drawings of the same
story. This complex work, displayed here for the first time in its
entirety, is made up of several layers and it weaves together
various narrative elements. One occasionally loses the thread
of the narratives which the very pared down installation both
condenses and expands at the same time. The series of drawings
covered in black, "like an overexposed film", both contradicts
and suspends the didactic and evidential nature of the image in
question, turning interpretation into a quest and at the same time
creating a screen which draws the beholder deep into the images
– a screen on which he or she can project an interpretation.
tr. J.H.
Born in 1979 in Mexico (Mexique), where he lives and works.
Untitled (Title assigned : Poupée, 1992). Collection LaM Lille Métropole
musée d’art moderne, d’art contemporain et d’art brut, Villeneuve d’Ascq.
Photography : Philip Bernard.
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Les Prairies's artists
YANN SéRANDOUR
Un cours d’eau paresseux à travers les prairies, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and galery gb agency, Paris.
Photography : Yann Sérandour.
Yann Sérandour's work has evolved within the world of books and bookshops. He has
produced a number of pieces in which he has extended or given a twist to the emblematic
works of conceptual artists from art history who have used books, texts or printed matter.
He has adopted indexing, listing and reproduction processes and applied them to the very
people who were the first to use them. Through quotation and appropriation, his referential
art plays on the meanings of signs, offering reinterpretations, even totally new stories, of art
and its history. A lazy stream flowing through the prairies would be the translation (slightly
adapted for the Rennes Biennale 2012) of the Japanese paper-marbling technique called
Suminagashi. Drops of different coloured inks are dripped using a paintbrush into a tray of
clear water so that they float in concentric rings which the artist then disturbs with a feather.
When a design is ready, the artist places a sheet of paper on the surface of the water and
it picks up the imprint of the suspended pattern. In an installation consisting of a series of
eight stainless steel trays, Sérandour revisits the technique of this ephemeral art form in
which attention to the expression of natural forces overrides any controlling intention the
artist may have. The formats and the positioning of the trays in this installation map the
layout of the display cabinets in the Cabinet du Livre d’Artiste – the exhibition venue for this
joint project in which Yann Sérandour is aided and abetted by Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc
and Pierre Leguillon.
A. B. tr. J.H.
Born in 1974 in Vannes (France), lives and works around Rennes
and Paris (France).
Production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012.

MATHIEU K. ABONNENC
PIERRE LEGUILLON
YANN SéRANDOUR
Sans Tambours ni trompettes, 2012. Photography : Yann Sérandour.
Les Prairies's artists
Co-Production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012,
Cabinet du livre d'artiste.
Avec le soutien de
l'entreprise Self Signal.
Just to prove that, in the words of Mallarmé, "everything in the world exists in order to end up as
a book", Yann Sérandour's part in this concerns the first stage in the existence of books: making
the paper. In his installation at the Newway Mabilais he conjures up both the experiments of the
brilliant scientist-printer David Séchard in Balzac's Lost Illusions and the ancestral Japanese
marbling technique of suminagashi. A teaching aid – a textbook on the history of papermaking
published in 1954 in Japan – is used as a matrix. Its marbled flyleaf is blown up to the exact
dimensions of the Cabinet du Livre d’Artiste (CLA). The eight windows of the venue are each
covered by the corresponding part of the image. From that moment on, the CLA becomes a
predetermined area comparable to a page of a book and the artists' intervention is the response
to a problem of page layout, converted to the three dimensions of the venue's architecture.
First on the blank paper are images, old photo prints from press agencies. These are supplied
by Pierre Leguillon who collected them over the years. They are pictures of American mobile
libraries from the 1950s. Then comes the text: notes, dates and captions inscribed by Mathieu
K. Abonnenc directly onto the Perspex of the windows, following the curves of the marbling on
the paper and creating a historical frieze whose rigour is thwarted by the random nature of the
papermaking technique. By working in layers, each one of which corresponds to one of the artists,
to one medium and one level of interpretation, Yann Sérandour, Pierre Leguillon and Mathieu K.
Abonnenc create a historical fabric in the microcosm of the space of a window.
A. N. tr. J.H.
retrouvez ces artistes au Cabinet du livre d’artiste
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70
Les Prairies's artists
MICHAEL E. SMITH
Trouble stand, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and galery KOW, Berlin. Photography : Alexander Koch.
Detroit born artist Michael E. Smith's work is not what you could call optimistic. It has
a resolutely post-apocalyptic slant, evoking human fragments, urban catastrophes,
unrecognizable detritus and the consequences of dark events. He has a penchant for
unusual industrial materials like plastics, car seats, foam and textiles, and a predilection
for techniques like grilling or melting that might seem more suited to testing products
to the limit rather than artistic creation. But it is exactly this kind of experiment
bordering on psychopathy that defines his activities. Smith carefully places his works
in unconventional places (at the foot of a wall, on the ceiling, or in corners). the albeit
Spartan installation of the works is as important as the works themselves. The overall
dramatic effect is undeniable and belies the economy of means. But all this melancholy
and drama does not affect his incomparable humour. His vision of the world is so grim
and serious that it would be impossible to laugh at it and yet the tragedy and the
apocalyptic anxiety of it all come across as much too harsh and intense for it not to carry
within itself its own, necessary catharsis
C. S. tr. J.H.
Born in 1977 in Detroit (United States) where he lives and works.
Production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012.

BATIA SUTER
Shelter Series, 2012. D. R.
Since the mid-1990s Swiss artist Batia Suter has been collecting, compiling and
reproducing thousands of images. The second-hand books that she has hunted
out for the sake of their illustrations are sometimes displayed with no alterations
– open, aligned, or in staggered rows like brickwork – to form thick carpets or
long tables covered with images. But more generally the iconography is extracted
from the books and becomes the object of editorial redistribution on the walls.
Suter's organisational criteria for the many images she has amassed tend to
vary. Some are juxtaposed because of morphological, functional or iconographic
affinities. Others just seem to be grouped according to their print style. The grids
of textured façades, drain covers and checked shirts that Sol LeWitt presented
in his book PhotoGrids (1977) were forerunners of Batia Suter's conceptual
approach. The inventory of roofs presented in Roofs (2012) owes something to
the architectural typologies of German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher,
with the difference, however, that Suter collects already existing images. She
has also forsaken the grid in favour of piling, and has broken typological
confines in order to encompass a far wider definition of roofing that includes, for
example, the megaliths of Stonehenge and Le Corbusier's Chapel at Ronchamp.
Since the Bechers, data bases and search engines like Google Image have
changed the situation radically: things have become less hierarchical and more
decompartmentalised.
H. M. tr. J.H.
Born in 1967 in Bülach (Switzerland), lives and works in Amsterdam (Netherlands).
Les Prairies's artists
Production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012.
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Les Prairies's artists
FRANCISCO TROPA
Terra Platónica, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and galery Quadrado Azul, Porto. Photography : Guilherme Carmelo.
Production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012.
Portuguese artist Francisco Tropa's art is a perfect contemporary example of what Harald
Szeemann described as individual mythology. Tropa not only creates objects, he also draws
up constellations of specific references through which ideally the objects can be interpreted.
In spite of the potentially esoteric nature of his works he is not a mystic. The sources of his
sculptures, performances, photographs, drawings and printings are to be found in the history
of the media he uses, in classical art, philosophy and literature, as well as in classic themes
such as memento mori, ritual, games and time. The striking and enigmatic Terra Platonica
(2012) includes a number of Tropa's preoccupations – the classical technique of cast bronze, and
questions of ritual and temporality. The piece was inspired by a strange photograph by Edward
S. Curtis illustrating an obscure funeral rite, from his famous series on North American Indians.
Tropa made a cast from something representing the mummy curled into the foetal position. It is
displayed here hanging from cables. The title refers to pre-Copernican belief in a flat Earth at
the centre of the universe. Curtis's total incomprehension of the mysterious rite could be seen
as comparable, as if it were a microcosmic analogy with the pre-Copernican model.
C. S. tr. J.H.
Born in 1968 in Lisbon (Portugal), where he lives and works.

ANDRé VALENSI
Les Prairies's artists
Objet d’Analyse, 1969. Collection Musée d’Art Moderne of Saint-Etienne Métropole.
Photography : Yves Bresson.
André Valensi was one of the founding theorists and
artists of the Supports / Surfaces Group (1969–1972),
which is considered as the last abstract avant-garde in
France. The artists in the group were purists and political
militants who deconstructed painting in order to reduce
it to its bare essentials – picture, surface, grid, stretcher,
frame, and so on. They rejected any outside influence such
as narrative, art history or artists' lives. Objets d’analyse
offers the beholder various studies of colour, form and
spatial relationship. In this work Valensi methodically
split up the colour brown into blue, yellow, red and violet,
which he applied to lengths of ribbon or tied fibres that
he then made into "chains of chains". And yet Valensi
claimed that he had never made any objects by plaiting
or weaving and he knew nothing about these techniques.
If, like Claude Viallat, André Valensi had used ropes and
nets, it was to ensnare the beholder. And indeed Piège
à regard made a clear reference to Marcel Duchamp's
installation for the First Paper of Surrealism exhibition
in 1942. Valensi's shifting grid transposes the plane into
three-dimensional space; as the spectator moves about
there is an alternation of gaps and solids, and the colours
move. Valensi left Supports / Surfaces in 1971 to devote his
energies to his own paintings.
Born in 1947 in Paris (France), died in 1999.
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Les Prairies's artists
MARION VERBOOM
Charte, 2012. installation view. Photography : Marion Verboom.
Marion Verboom's sculptures are hybrids of forms borrowed from the history of sculpture,
from architecture and geology, but given unity by the materials. The source of her work
is drawing, which has enabled her to create a vocabulary of shapes and to gain a more
open understanding of sculpture, freed of questions of function and feasibility. This
freedom enables her to use a fragment as a self-contained form at the same time as a
part of a whole in delicately balanced assemblages. Her working practice is redolent of
grafting, both conceptually and physically. She melds figurative patterns and minimal
sculpture, architecturally inspired forms and sedimentary concretions. In her works Marion
Verboom seems to be exploring two opposing concepts of architecture: John Ruskin's
recommendations on ornamentation and Adolf Loos for the functionalist aspect. Yet in any
one sculpture she manages to avoid both by making it neither functional nor decorative.
Agger takes its name from the Latin word for a kind of fortification in the form of mounds of
earth at the time of the Romans. The exhibition consists of modules shaped by the impact
of light on their contours; it oscillates between the organic fluctuation of a surface and the
rigour of a geometric composition, expanding and contracting within the dimensions of the
allotted space. It is a composition, a cosmogony that involves nature, the human body, the
implement and construction. It is a "land or a landscape modelled by human hand".
A. L. tr. J.H.
Born in 1983 in Nantes (France), lives and works in Paris
(France).
Co-Production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012,
40mcube.
retrouvez cette artiste à 40mcube

MARIE VOIGNIER
Le Terrain était déjà occupé (le futur), 2012. Courtesy of the artist and galery Marcelle Alix, Paris.
Les Prairies's artists
Co-production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012,
Frac Bretagne.
The subjects of Marie Voignier's videos are as varied as they are rooted in reality – an abandoned
wild-west theme park, an artificial tropical beach in former East Germany, or a bird migration
phenomenon that destroys crops are typical examples. In her sober style she switches registers easily
from the fictional to the documentary to the cinematographic, thus underlining the reversibility of
genres and point of view that can be applied to any one situation. She picks up different aspects of an
event and brings out what is strange and absurd in it by simply representing it – the films reveal what
lies underneath the surface realism. For the Ateliers de Rennes 2012, and in keeping with the spirit of
Les Prairies, Marie Voignier has put herself in a real-life situation, that of looking at a building plot
and investigating the different ways of approaching construction on it. A surveyor, a town-planner and
a landscape architect take it in turns to express their vision and to explain their activity, and in doing so
give the lie to the perception of the plot as a mere expanse of terrain. For this video Marie Voignier drew
inspiration from the television documentaries about architecture that Eric Rohmer made with Jean-Paul
Pigeat in the 1970s. These films, incidentally, were an essential source for this curator in creating the
artistic project of Les Prairies. Forty years on, there has been a noticeable change in attitudes towards
unbuilt-on land, whether it is meadow, field or wasteland. One is unlikely now to see someone stand
in front of a huge field and say, as one of the architects in the Rohmer film does, "Look, there, there is
nothing". The beholder can reappraise his or her perception of built reality.
A. B. tr. J.H.
Born in 1974 in Ris-Orangis (France), lives and works in Paris (France).
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Les Prairies's artists
JACKIE WINSOR
Yellow inside out piece, 1984-1985. Collection Frac Bretagne.
Photography : Florian Kleinefenn.
ŽELIMIR ŽILNIK
Zelimir ̌ ŽZilnik's ̌
films are based on a direct
documentary approach to social reality. The
protagonists of his films are often marginal figures
excluded from the social and political system –
street children, the unemployed, homeless people,
foreigners, transvestites, people without papers,
gypsies. Zilnik concentrates on different forms of
domination or exclusion from the state. Black Film
(1971) shows him in the streets of Novia Sad (Serbia)
inviting homeless people to stay with him for two
days. His camera shows first a highly unusual
situation, then an insoluble discussion on the
question of homeless people. With dark irony, Zilnik ̌
admitted that his position while making the film was
ambiguous. He wanted to make a socially committed
film as a means to forgiveness, but he couldn't keep
those men in his home because they stank so much.
He explained later that Black Film is an essay on the
position of the filmmaker. The work is emblematic
of the Yugoslavian Black Wave (1963-1972), of which
he was part alongside Dušan Makavejev,ŽZivojin ̌
Pavlovic ̌ and Aleksandar Petrovic. ̌ Like other
"New Waves" ̌ in the cinema of that period, it had a
profound effect on European film-making.
M. C. tr. J. H.
Born in 1942 in Niš (Serbia), lives and works in
Novi Sad (Serbia).
Jackie Winsor was associated with the post-minimalist generation
of artists that included Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman Richard Serra,
and Richard Grosvenor but she has since developed a style of her
own that exploits the tension between abstract vocabulary and
handling the materials. Winsor's interest in form and materials
and their relationship to space was already apparent in her early
works in the 1960s. Her first concern was to arrange things like rope,
string, and steel cables, then to make combinations such as bricks
and ropework, nails and wood. She would work within a geometric
syntax of squares, cubes and grids, letting herself be guided by the
materials. This language enabled her to lay emphasis on the way
she used materials, something that was particularly evidenced by
processes of plaiting and knotting (Bound grid, 1971-1972), but also
by visible cut-outs (Yellow inside out piece, 1984-1985). Bound grid
(1971-1972) is a perfect example of her methods. It is a grid of wooden
branches roped together with plaited hemp. The process (knotting,
roping, twisting) and the thick ropework give such weight to the form
that it looks like a craft object or an agricultural implement. Winsor's
manual processes have ended up acquiring a ritual meaning – the
sense of an artistic ritual invoking a presence in a disembodied
modernism from which she has nevertheless taken certain principles
and patterns such as repetition, geometry, and a sense of series.
The forms and the vocabulary may be minimalist, but the materials
inhabit the forms and elaborate an inner syntax. The sculptures
convey the sensation of a "dogged existence".
A. B. tr. J.H.
Born in 1941 in Newfoundland (Canada), lives and works in
New-York (United States).
Black film, 1971. Courtesy of the l'artist. D. R.

78
Les Prairies's artists
Gare SNCF, parvis sud
LOIS WEINBERGER,
Garden, 1994-2012.
Production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012.
Since the beginning of the 1970s Lois Weinberger has been
militant in the cause of spontaneous vegetation. He is an
opponent of voluntaristic cultivated plots and weeding,
and the ideas of purity and purification that go with them.
Weinberger is the advocate of weeds, the fringe and the
interstices. His preoccupations, in fact, are more political
than botanical. Through the dynamics of indigenous and
non-indigenous species he raises the question of conflict
between native populations and immigrants and the
contingent problems of identity and migration. Processes of
hybridization, colonization and interference occur and lead
to a progressive blurring of the distinction between «wild»
and «cultivated». In Weinberger’s work it is always the hardy,
invasive, self-propagating plant that prevails.
Garden occupies an interstice of the city of Rennes. The
southern forecourt of the station, which is bordered by
railway lines, a prison and waste ground, presents a usefully
imprecise area on which to place two thousand yellow plastic
buckets full of earth and spontaneous vegetation. «I don’t
plant anything and I don’t sow anything. I leave the soil
open to whatever comes, wherever it comes from – the wind,
animals, even the earth itself», says Weinberger a great
believer in «letting things happen».
Revived for Prairies, 3rd edition of Les Ateliers de Rennes
2012 – biennial for contemporary art (September 15th-
December 9th 2012), this ephemeral and changing work of art
will remain settled until the end of the biennial. It has been
realized with the cooperation of Ville de Rennes.
Lois Weinberger
Born in 1947 in Stams, lives and works in Vienna (Austria).
Garden, 2002. installation view, Lower Austria
Museum, St Pölten.
Courtesy of the artist.
“Plastic buckets are arranged on a concrete surface, filled
with soil from open land. Since there are seeds in the soil /
the work will develop on its own. Spontaneous vegetation.
With time, all that remains of the pots will be fragments of
/ colorless plastic on the overgrown areas. These, too, will
ultimately dissolve, and the blossoms alone will recall their
initial color. Later, my work will hardly be noticed / the
creator has disappeared.“
L.W., Vienna, 1994.

80
La Caravane
Both a project archive and a video/
film viewing area, La Caravane is a
mobile structure that will bring Ateliers
de Rennes to the public. It provides a
library and a film collection linked to the
artistic project: introductions, catalogues,
"fine books", as well as artist videos,
documentaries, cinema, and a broad
range of online resources. Through
this deliberately limited and changing
collection, visitors can become familiar
with the inspiration behind Les Prairies.
Furthermore, La Caravane will also be a
space for discussion and contemplation.
WEB NEWS LA CARAvANE :
www.lesateliersderennes.fr,
facebook / Les Ateliers de Rennes
and twitter @ADR2012.
Publications
The artistic project brought to you by Lucidar
for Ateliers de Rennes 2012 grants considerable
importance to publishing projects available in
various forms, and published and distributed in
different ways:
Literature :
Over 5 writers have been invited to write a
short - new - text that fits into the project context,
i.e. the Prairie, the West, etc.. This invitation is
inspired by the popular American format of dime
novels, which covered various subjects as well as
Westerns. The aim is to revisit popular narrative
genres and to form a collection of small pieces
that are as varied in their subject matter as in
their literary approach.
Writters :
Dime Novels
Pascale Bouhénic
Stéphane Bouquet
Frédéric Ciriez
Claire Guézengar
Maylis de Kerangal
Just like Buffalo Bill's show, the legend of the
Wild West was written even before it was won.
Published by Beadle and Adams as early as
1860, Dime Novels played a role in spreading
the legend and celebrating the exploits of the
pioneers that defied the prairie and its inherent
dangers.
THE COLLECTION IS AvAILABLE
AT THE NEWWAy MABILAIS'S
TICKET OFFICE
PRICE : 2€

82
Le Show de l’Ouest
Le Show de l'Ouest is a multidisciplinary project
associated to the Prairies art project. It offers a
variety of formats: performances, conferences,
meetings, walks, video projections, documentary
and fictional films, etc..
Inspired by the famous Buffalo Bill circus that
contributed to the legend of the Wild West at the
end of the 19th century, Le Show de l'Ouest is on
tour and specialises in one evening/afternoon
events.
Cinéma L’Arvor,
Association Au bout du plongeoir,
CCNRB – Musée de la Danse,
Ciné-TNB,
Ciné-Tambour – Service culturel de l’Université Rennes
2,
le Département des Arts plastiques de l’Université
Rennes 2,
Diapason – Service culturel de Rennes 1,
École Européenne Supérieure d’Art de Bretagne – site
de Rennes,
Le Triangle – Cité de la danse,
Le village – Site d’expérimentation artistique,
Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show(est. 1882)
Rendez-vous
Tuesday September 25 th [17.30]
EESAB-Rennes - Auditorium
Lecture : Emmanuel Rubio - architecture
Wednesday October 3rd [18.00 - 20.30]
Ciné-Tambour – Rennes 2
Cinema - films in echo with Les Prairies
Tuesday October 2nd [17.30]
EESAB-Rennes - Auditorium
Lecture : Gyan Panchal- artist
Dimanche 7 octobre [14.00 - 17.00]
Le Show de l’Ouest in Bazouges-la-Pérouse
Tuesday October 16th [17.30]
EESAB-Rennes - Auditorium
Lecture : Florian Fouché - artist
Wednesday October 24th [18.00 - 20.30]
Ciné-Tambour – Rennes 2
Cinema - films in echo with Les Prairies
Friday November 23rd [19.00]
Le Triangle - Rennes
Literary evening with Julien d’Abrigeon,
Patrick Châtelier, Cécile Minard
Wednesday November 28th [18.30]
Library Les Champs libres
Meeting with Gilles Clément, moderated by
Jean-Marc Huitorel - art critic
Tuesday December 4th [17.30]
EESAB-Rennes - Auditorium
Lecture : Dove Allouche - artist
Wednesday December 5Th [18.00 - 20.30]
Ciné-Tambour – Rennes 2
Cinema - films in echo with Les Prairies
INFORMATION
ThE Show DE L’oUEST
WWW.LESATELIERSDERENNES.FR
After the conquest, this hero of the Wild West found himself suddenly unemployed, and decided to
form a show that would go on to tour America and travel to Europe, spreading the myth of the West.
The shows re-enacted historic but already legendary events and scenes from the Wild West, such
as the battles between the white man and Indians, and stagecoach robberies, as well as scenes
from the Indian's and pioneer's everyday lives. The circus made actual characters from history
play themselves: famous Indians such as Geronimo and Sitting Bull, as well as Calamity Jane
and various other characters from the Wild West. The show was based around re-enactments and
embodied an America that invented its own legend almost as events happened. Is this characteristic
of a "people without history" (Gertrude Stein)? This example of pragmatism also bears witness to an
entrepreneurial spirit that was in some aspects wild.

84
Practical informations
OPENING TIMES :
12pm - 7pm / Tuesday - Sunday
Ticket offices :
Newway Mabilais, Frac Bretagne,
Ticket office closes 45 minutes
before closing
Office du Tourisme de Rennes Métropole
11, rue Saint-Yves 35 000 Rennes
—
PRICES TICKET :
Prices Ticket for Newway Mabilais and FRAC Bretagne
Full price : 6 €
Subsidies : 3 €
The reduced rate applies to :
. young people aged 18-26,
. disabled people,
. teachers,
. school group supervisors,
. groups of more than 8 (reservation required),
—
Free entry upon presentation of proof for :
. under 18s,
. students of art, history of art, architecture,
. registered at the Maison des artistes,
. ICOM (International Council of Museums),
. press card holders,
. Culture card holders,
. Sortir card holders.
—
Further reduction : 1 €
Free entry with guided tour supplement payable on
reservation only,
. school groups,
. community centers.
—
Pass : 12 €
Unlimited access to Newway Mabilais, Frac Bretagne
for the duration of Les Prairies.
—
NEWWAy MABILAIS
WWW.LESATELIERSDERENNES.FR
INFORMATIONS AND RESERvATIONS :
TéL : 02 23 45 43 93
MEDIATION@LESATELIERSDERENNES.FR

Newway Mabilais
www.lesateliersderennes.fr
2, rue de la Mabilais
35 000 Rennes
Opening times Tuesday-Sunday
12pm to 7pm
Closed Mondays
Access : bus nº9 "Malakoff",
nº4 "Chèques Postaux",
le vélo STAR, parking.
Frac Bretagne
www.fracbretagne.fr
19, avenue André-Mussat
35 000 Rennes
Opening times Tuesday-Sunday
12pm to 7pm
Closed Mondays
Access : metro "Villejean Université",
bus nº4 "Beauregard",
le vélo STAR.
La Criée
centre d’art contemporain
www.criee.org
Halles centrales
Place Honoré-Commeurec
35 000 Rennes
tél. 02 23 62 25 10
la-criee@ville-rennes.fr
Opening times Tuesday-Friday
12pm to 7pm,
Saturday and Sunday
2pm to 7pm,
Closed Mondays
Access : metro "République",
le vélo STAR.
FREE ENTRANCE
Musée des beaux-arts de Rennes
www.mbar.org
20, quai Émile Zola
35 000 Rennes
tél. 02 23 62 17 45
museebeauxarts@ville-rennes.fr
Opening times Wednesday-Sunday
10am to 12pm and 2pm to 6pm,
Tuesday 10am to 6pm,
Closed Mondays
Prices ticket :
Musée + temporary exhibition
Full : 5,95 euros
Subsities : 3 euros or 2 euros for Les
Ateliers de Rennes's day tickets
holders.
Access : metro "République",
bus nº4, 6, 40, 64, 67 "Musée des
beaux-arts", nº54, 55, 56 "Lycée
Emile-Zola", le Vélo STAR.
PHAKT
Centre Culturel Colombier
www.phakt.fr
5, place des Colombes
35 000 Rennes
tél. 02 99 65 19 70
contact@phakt.fr
Opening times Monday-Saturday
1pm to 7.15 pm and on rdv.
Closed Sundays
Access : metro "Charles de Gaulle",
bus nº9, 5 "Plélo Colombier", nº4, 11,
40, 64 "Place de Bretagne",
le vélo STAR.
FREE ENTRANCE
Practical informations
40mcube
www.40mcube.org
48, avenue Sergent Maginot
35 000 Rennes
tél. 02 90 09 64 11
contact@40mcube.org
Opening times Tuesday to Saturday
2pm to 6 pm, and on rdv.
Closed Mondays
Access : metro "République",
bus nº4, 6 "Pont de Chateaudun",
le vélo STAR.
FREE ENTRANCE
Cabinet du livre d’artiste
www.incertain-sens.org
www.sans-niveau-ni-metre.org
Université Rennes 2 - Villejean
Place du Recteur Henri Le Moal
35 000 Rennes
Bâtiment Érève
tél. 02 99 14 15 86
noury_aurelie@yahoo.fr
Opening times Tuesday to Friday
11am to 6pm, and on rdv.
Access : metro «Villejean
Université», bus nº4 "Université",
le vélo STAR.
FREE ENTRANCE
Galerie Art & Essai
www.univ-rennes2.fr
www.galerieartessai.fr
Université Rennes 2 - Villejean
Place du Recteur Henri Le Moal
35 000 Rennes
tél. 02 99 14 11 42
galerie@uhb.fr
Opening times Tuesday to Friday
1pm to 6pm and on rdv.
Access : metro «Villejean
Université», bus nº4 «Université»,
le vélo STAR.
FREE ENTRANCE
85

86
During the third edition of Ateliers de Rennes - biennale d'art
contemporain, fifteen contemporary art venues of Rennes
Métropole unite to create BIENNALE OFF.
Event parallel and complementary to the biennial BIENNALE
OFF federates structures involved in contemporary art and offers
audiences an exceptional program for nearly three months.
Exhibitions, meetings, performances, publications ...
BIENNALE OFF offers a specially designed course through fifteen
places with multiple approaches and unique of contemporary art.
MORE INFORMATION : WWW.BIENNALEOFF.FR
DMA GALERIE
23, rue de Chateaudun
- Rennes
tél. 02 99 87 20 10
regie.dma@gmail.com
www.dmagalerie.com
du lundi au vendredi
9h > 12h & 14h > 18h
06 SEPT - 12 OCT
COSMORAMA
ATELIER à qUATRE
FRéDéRIC LAROCHE ET
GwEnAEëLLE-VInCIAnE
VInoUSE, AkA ATELIER à qUATRE
18 OCT - 12 DÉC
DIy OR BUy
LES fRèRES
RIPOULAIN
DAvID RENAULT, MATTHIEU
TREMBLIN
24 NOV
ELECTRIC FIRE
CAMP
DMA & CRAB CAKE
PARTy
06 SEPT & 12 OCT
22H30 > 3H
MOON STATION
EESAB
SITE DE RENNES
école européenne supérieure
d’art de Bretagne
tél. 02 23 62 22 60
erba@ville-rennes.fr
www.erba-rennes.fr
galerie du Cloître
34, rue Hoche - Rennes
18 SEPT - 25 OCT
LES ToILES En PRêT
CORENTIN CANESSON
ACTIvATIONS
PIERRE GALoPIn
HORS-LES-MURS
ESPACE STANDARDS
2 rue des Portes Mordelaises,
Rennes
du mercredi au samedi
14h > 18h
12 AU 22 SEPT
RE: #3BIS

GALERIE MICA
Route du Meuble,
La Brosse - St Grégoire
tél. 09 79 09 17 31
contact@galeriemica.com
www.galeriemica.com
du mercredi au samedi
15h > 19h
15 SEPT - 10 NOV
VERNISSAGE 15 SEPT
19H (INAUGURATION OFF)
éRIC BAUDART
DoMInIqUE
GhESqUIèRE
SALLE POLyvALENTE
FRANCK CHAUvET
23 NOV - 19 JAN
ATOM
(ABRI TEMPORAIRE POUR
oISEAUx MIGRATEURS)
oDILE DECq
LE TRIAnGLE
CITé DE LA DANSE
Boulevard de Yougoslavie,
- Rennes
tél. 02 99 22 27 27
infos@letriangle.org
www.letriangle.org
15 NOV - 21 DÉC
NICOLAS BARREAU &
jULES CHARBONNET
vIvARIUM
ZI Rte de Lorient
29, rue du Manoir de Servigné
- Rennes
tél. 09 50 61 66 76
vivariumatelier.blogspot.fr
12 AU 28 SEPT
zONE AUTONOME
MUTUALISéE
EMILIEn ADAGE
FRANçOIS FEUTRIE
Tony REGAZZonI
SéBASTIEN RéMy
BI RonGRonG
CAMILLE ROUx
THORSTEN STREICHARDT
CAMILLE GIRARD ET
PAUL BRUNET
17 NOV
VEnTE AUx EnChèRES
LES ORPAILLEURS
HOTEL DES vENTES DE RENNES
19H
STANDARDS
2, rue des Portes Mordelaises
- Rennes
tél. 06 65 63 10 62
du mercredi au samedi
14h > 18h
29 SEPT - 27 OCT
LES DéTECTIvES
SAUVAGES
TOBIAS LöFFLER
ONIRIS
GALERIE D’ART ConTEMPoRAIn
38 rue d’Antrain - Rennes
tél. 02 99 36 46 06
/ 06 71 633 633
contact@galerie-oniris.fr
www.galerie-oniris.fr
du mardi au samedi 14h >
18h30
JUSqU’AU 22 SEPT
FRANçOIS MORELLET
oDILE DECq
2 OCT - 3 NOV
ODE BERTRAND
AURELIE NEMOURS
6 NOV - 8 DÉC
yvES POPET
PASSAGE 25
25, rue Surcouf - Rennes
tél. 02 99 14 22 75
/ 06 81 53 13 52
ederoost@orange.fr
du mardi au samedi
14h > 18h
dimanche 15h > 18h
18 OCT - 30 NOV
MATIèRES
PREMIèRES :
ENjEUx
CONTEMPORAINS
C. BUjEAU
HANS MEyER PETERSEN
jACqUES DoMEAU
ERICK DEROOST
29 NOV - 6 DÉC
NATHALIE LEONARD
PEINTURES
GALERIE
NATHALIE
CLOUARD
22, rue Hoche - Rennes
tél. 02 99 63 51 23
nathalie.clouard@wanadoo.fr
www.galerie-nathalie-clouard.com
du mardi au samedi
14h > 19h
13 SEPT - 10 NOV
LoïC
LE GRoUMELLEC
2 èME exposition personnelle
15 NOV - 5 JAN
jACqUES VILLEGLÉ
SCULPTURES ET ESTAMPES
GALERIE PICTURA
NET PLUS
40, rue du Bignon - Chantepie
du lundi au vendredi 9h > 18h
15 OCT - 14 DÉC
RICHARD vOLANTE
PhoToGRAPhIES
MéTRO, BOULOT, DODO
GALERIE nET PLUS
40, rue du Bignon - Chantepie
tél. 02 99 22 77 99
www.facebook.com/
galerienetpluscontact@net-plus.fr
du lundi au vendredi 9h > 18h
28 SEPT - 28 OCT
AUTOPORTRAITS
LENDROIT
éDITIONS
23, rue Quineleu - Rennes
tél. 02 23 30 42 27
lendroitgalerie@free.fr
www.lendroit.org
du lundi au vendredi
14h > 18h
15 SEPT - 9 DÉC
DERRIèRE LA
vITRINE
GUILLAUME PInARD
PIERRE LA POLICE
BLEx BOLEx
biennale OFF
SUPERSTRAT
48, bld Villebois Mareuil
- Rennes
talweg@ultralocal.fr
www.ultralocal.fr
15 SEPT - 9 DÉC
APPARITIon SPoRADIqUE
ToUT AU LonG DE LA
BIENNALE
SUPERSTRAT
ExPOSITION HORS
LES MURS
TALwEG
ULTRALOCAL
LE BON ACCUEIL
74, canal St Martin - Rennes
tél. 09 53 84 45 42
contact@bon-accueil.org
www.bon-accueil.org
du mercredi au samedi
14h > 18h
dimanche 15h > 19h
CHAPELLE
ST JOSEPH
(MONFORT)
18 SEPT - 6 OCT
CONCERT DE STEvE RODEN
ET MAThIAS DELPLAnqUE
LE 18 SEPT - 19H
SUIVI DU VERnISSAGE DE
L’ExPoSITIon
LE BON ACCUEIL
(RENNES)
27 SEPT - 9 DÉC
STEVE RoDEn (USA)
LE GRAnD
CORDEL
MAISON DES jEUNES ET DE LA
CULTURE
18, rue des Plantes - Rennes
tél. 02 99 87 49 49
www.grand-cordel.com
contact@grnd-cordel.com
lun, mar, jeu, ven 14h > 20h30
mercredi 9h > 12h30 & 14h > 20h30
samedi 9h > 13h
12 OCT - 17 NOV
CITySCAPE 2095
MÉCAnIqUES
DISCURSIvES
87

ARTS
LE FESTIVAL D’AMBRONAY
DÉBORDE,
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TÉLÉRAMA AUSSI
Le monde bouge. Pour vous, Télérama explose
chaque semaine, de curiosités et d’envies nouvelles.
Plus de débordements sur telerama.fr
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/ Tom Kelley Archive / GO Archives / Mark Karrass / Corbis / Liane Riß / Westend61 / Nicolas Ferrando
/ Corbis /Seth Joel Photography / Cultura.
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et en entrant le code ATE2012
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94
Organisation // Art Norac
Bruno Caron // Chairman
Catherine Brégand // Communication and patronage manager
Eliane Perron // Director assistant
Bernard Crespy // Accountant
Benoît Bonamy // Counsel
Conception // Association Lucidar
François Forge // Chairman
Marie-Dominique Debat // Treasurer
Anne Bonnin // Exhibition commissioner and director
Valérie Renard // Administration and patronage manager
Marie Cantos // General coordinator
Virginie Redois // Communication, press relations, and publishing manager
Chloé Orveau // Education program manager
Simon Dablin // Responsable régie et technique
Flavie Hue // Responsable de billetterie
Audrey Pennachio // Communication, press relations, and patronage assistant
Lauren Papet // Production assistant
Charlotte Fisselier // Education program assistant
Interns : Cécile Bailly, Marion Le Bec, Maxime Le Clanche, Gauthier Lesturgie, Soizig Louédec.
Education program assistants : Anthony Bodin, Véronique Meunier, Marie Mourougaya, Johanna
Rocard, Thomas Tudoux.
Education program interns : Juliet Davis, Emilie Fromenteze, Marion Lemoult, Soizig Louédec, Cassie
Quintin, Marine Ricard.
Montage : Rémi Albert, Antoine Bertron, Anthony Glais, Ludovic Jouet, Damien Le Dévedec, Yann
Lesueur, Laurent Petitot. Stagiaire montage : David Picard.
Room supervisors : Virginie Jeanne, Julien Goron, Clémence Moullé Prévost.
Conception graphic design / Tour guide & program : Maxime Le Clanche
Editing : Anne Bonnin / Marie Cantos
Additionals translations : Marie Canet
Relectures : Alice Norasingh-Ertaud
Web site : BUG
Press relations : Sylvie Chabroux
Records of the artists were written by :
Anne Bonnin (A. B.), Marie Canet (M. C.), Kadist Art Foundation (K. A. F.), Nadine Labedade – Courtesy
FRAC Centre (N. L.), Anne Langlois – 40mcube (A. L.), Hélène Meisel (H. M.), Aurélie Noury (A. N.),
Camille Pageard (C. P.), Florence Ostende (F. O.), Chris Sharp (C. S.).

Organisation :
Partners :
Sponsors :
Production partners :
Société Crézé
Media partners :
Exhibition places :
Many thanks to :
Partners of Show de l’Ouest :
Le CCNRB – Musée de la Danse, le cinéma l’Arvor, l’association Au bout du plongeoir, le
Ciné-TNB, le Ciné-Tambour – Service culturel de l’Université Rennes 2, le Diapason – Service
culturel de Rennes 1, l’École européenne supérieure d’art de Bretagne – site de Rennes, Le
Triangle – Cité de la danse, Le Village – Site d’expérimentation artistique,
la Ville de Saint-Malo.
95

96
Thanks
Les Ateliers de Rennes – biennale d’art contemporain warmly thank for their contribution to
this 3rd edition , Les Prairies :
The exibition's and Show de l'Ouest artists,
The auteurs of the different publications,
The actors of the Show de l’Ouest & La Caravane,
The galleries,
The public and private lenders,
The institutions associated to different production,
Directors and teams of the partners exhibition places, and others partners for La Caravane and Show
de l’Ouest,
As for their help on specific projects or for their support throughout the implementation of Les
Prairies :
Marleen Gijsen et la René Daniëls Foundation, Ioana Popescu et le Musée du Paysan roumain de
Bucarest, Lisa Rosendahl et Iaspis, Eric Baugé, Julien Bailleul, Mehdi Teffahi and Territoires et
développement, Colette Barbier and the Fondation Ricard, Jean-Marc Poinsot and the Archives de la
Critique d'Art, Michaël Chéneau and the association Libre Art Bitre, Jean-Paul Legendre, Emmanuel
Pivain, Antoine Iehl et Marie-France Callarec and the groupe Legendre, Franck Fillaut, Adil Elmaliki,
Christophe Krier, Fabrice Motais, Philippe Rouply and JPR Électricité.
Kathy Alliou, Emmanuelle Anneix-Dao, Hervé Beurel, Pascal Blanchais, Gwénaël Blin, Laëtitia
Bouvier, Véronique Brégeon, Emmanuel Couet, Christine Desmoulins, Catherine Elkar, Caroline
Ferreira, Joëlle Folch, Carolina Grau, M. Guihéneuf, Caroline Hancock, Vit Havranek, Victoria Horton,
Jean-Marc Huitorel, Eliza Iacoblev, Claire Jacquet, Patrice Joly, Béatrice Josse, Sylvain Kermici,
Marianne Lanavère, Aude Launay, Emma Lavigne, Pierrick Marcellier, Philippe-Alain Michaud,
Benoît-Marie Moriceau, Ricardo Nicolau, Pedro Pereira, David Perreau, Denis Pinault, Nadine
Pouillon, Jonathan Pouthier, Julien Prévieux, Anthony Rio, Rita Santana, Guy Tortosa, Emmanuel
Thaunier.
Copyright ADAGP, Paris 2012 : Gilles Aillaud, René Daniëls, Étienne-Martin, Jan
Kempenaers, Thomas Kilpper, Aglaia Konrad.
Additives photographies credits :
Pages de couverture : Vincent-Victor Jouffe, Ville-es-Bret, Promenade de l’Assomption, 15 août 1995 /
Yann Peucat, Newway Mabilais, 2012 ; Newway Mabilais © Yann Peucat, 2012 ; Frac Bretagne
© Agence ODBC / Labtop ; La Criée centre d’art contemporain : Benoît Mauras ; Musée des beaux-arts
de Rennes © Musée des beaux-arts / Ville de Rennes ; PHAKT - Centre Culturel Colombier :
© PHAKT Centre Culturel Colombier ; 40mcube © 40mcube ; Cabinet du livre d’artiste © Cabinet du
livre d’artiste ; galerie Art & Essai, université Rennes 2 : vue exposition John Wood & Paul Harrison,
Notebook, 2011 © galerie Art & Essai, université Rennes 2 ; La Caravane © Maxime Le Clanche / Les
Ateliers de Rennes, 2012 ; Le Show de l’Ouest : Jocelyn Cottencin & Mathieu Renard - La poussière, la
sueur, la poudre © Maxime Le Clanche / Les Ateliers de Rennes, 2012.