Tenir les murs
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Tenir les murs
I thought to myself: what if I put together an unexpected, possibly even problematic exhibition, which forces the eye to consider the artworks in an entirely different way? An installation where the artworks are simply leaning against the walls!
While speaking with my colleague Yan Romanesky, the man who is constantly coming up with new ideas, he said that my concept reminded him of an expression he recently discovered in France and was quite fond of: “Tenir les murs” (literally – “holding up the walls”).
Then he added: “Tenir les murs, it is as if the artworks are holding up the walls!”
I turned to Google to understand the meaning of this expression, unknown to me until now. Through Wikipedia I found:
Tenir le mur – expression
To hang around, to be bored, to do nothing, to roam around in the streets
It is funny to think that contemporary art has often been identified and named as such. Maybe not as art that gets “bored”, but rather as a “boring” kind of art: even more so an art that pollutes the city as it ‘hangs around’ in the streets, like street art and graffiti.
Once again consulting Wikipedia, I discovered a quotation that perfectly describes my exhibition:
“Even if this phrase is relatively new, the Marx brothers, in ‘A night in Casablanca’, use the expression in a humorous way. While Harpo is leaning against a wall, a policeman arrives and asks him what he is doing there. Harpo answers that he is holding up the wall of the building and, when the policeman orders him to move along, the wall collapses to the ground.”
And there we have it! The exhibition Tenir les murs makes a reference to the significance of contemporary art. Although the works in this exhibition seem to be simply leaning againstthe walls for no reason, they are in fact the pillars of our cultural society. Contemporary art gathers together artists, thinkers, art critics, curators, museums, and galleries; a community that branches out and speaks to anyone who may be particularly curious and open-minded.
The exhibition Tenir les murs presents the artworks of Sarah Bertrand-Hamel, Marc Dulude, Massimo Guerrera, Benjamin Klein, Jason McKechnie, François Morelli, Michel Niquette, Fabrizio Perozzi, Sylvia Safdie and zipertatou.
Joyce Yahouda, Curator
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