Béatrice Balcou: Cérémonies
Béatrice Gross, Gallois Christophe, Emelie Renard, Eva Wittockx, Julie Pellegrin, Septembre Tiberghien, Vanessa Desclaux, Zoe Gray
MER. B&L, 2021
€39,00
Through performances, sculptures and installations, Béatrice Balcou (born 1976 in France, lives and works in Brussels) creates situations in which she offers new exhibition rituals that question our way of looking and perceiving objects – especially works of art. She is interested in the attention paid to the materiality of the work of art as much as to the behavior of the viewer, and thus questions the value given to art and the place assigned to it in our fashion. of contemporary life.
The Untitled Ceremonies by artist Béatrice Balcou consist of unpacking, installing, then disassembling and repacking the work of another artist from a public or private collection. Thus appears the discreet temporality of works of art, the oscillation which animates them between their state of dormancy – when they are in the reserves – and that of the exhibition. The profound attention that Béatrice Balcou devotes to each of the works of art that she chooses questions our way of looking at them and of experiencing them, reminds us of their status as objects and their materiality before they are reveal identity.
From these performances, sculptures called Placebos are born. Initially conceived as training tools for Ceremonies, these wooden replicas of the source works are then exhibited and become works in their own right, both “ghosts” of works and tangible memories of this exhibition ritual.
This catalog reviews all the Ceremonies (2013-2020) with their protocols written by the artist, author’s texts – Vanessa Desclaux, Christophe Gallois, Zoë Gray, Béatrice Gross, Julie Pellegrin, Émilie Renard, September Tiberghien and Eva Wittocx – as well as correspondence with artists, collection managers, gallery owners or publishers, so many perspectives through which we can follow the choreography that these Ceremonies weave, between gestures of work and gestures of care.
ISBN: 9789463933278
