“Medical Studies of a Potential Dream” at Eglise Saint Remi, Bordeaux

“Medical Studies of a Potential Dream” by Haseeb Ahmed, Julie Villard & Simon Brossard, Angela Jimenez Duran, Simon Gabourg, Jun Liu & Gael, Laura Gozlan, Adam Horvath, Eva Lhoest, Benoit Ménard, Manon Pretto, curated by Guillaume Baronner, at Eglise Saint Remi, Bordeaux, from 24/05/2024 to 29/06/2024.

The aim of this group exhibition project is to confront and highlight the work of young contemporary artists from Bordeaux and elsewhere in Europe, within a curatorial proposal articulated around a certain medical/scientific aesthetic. Indeed, after observing an enormous resurgence of organic forms and anthropomorphic figures in contemporary visual art over the last 20 years, a number of artists today seem fascinated by, and make use of, both formal and conceptual references from the medical and scientific world, far removed from any kind of “post-minimalism” but not without links to art history. Often depicting dystopian visions of our contemporary society, as if to further entrench it in a blurred, anxiety-ridden present, but also to highlight happy hypotheses of a future that’s closer than it seems. This exhibition is built around these practices. The relationship between medicine and science in the selected works will be multifaceted. From ecological and committed proposals, to post-humanist visions, digital drifts and neo-shamanic concerns, the exhibition will reveal where beliefs, philosophy, science and technology collide and intermingle, striving to depict the questions of present days. In order to stage such a proposal, a place with a sacred identity would seem to be an obvious choice, given the tensions and correlations it could exert with the works presented. At the heart of the exhibition will be an organic world in mutation, anthropomorphic drifts, autonomous systems and the reminiscences of ghostly virtual intelligences. All appear as an autonomous whole, governed by their own cadence and intrinsic logic.

“This word I use, HYPEROBJECT, it sounds like it’s your word. There are so many non-human beings in your work, who are both clearly alive and not so clearly so. I tend to see things from an animistic point of view. I try to show that everything is alive (or not dead – it’s almost as good!){…}I postulate that art comes to us from the future (and can I prove it?!) and so I think art of any kind is always ahead of our thinking. {…}I think art allows us to evoke the way things are in general: an umbrella, Sagittarius A*, coral, crumbs photons. I see art as a way of tuning in to what reality is, which is a strange reality.”

Timothy Morton, correspondence with BJORK, Oct 2014