BANQUET
Edible Sculptures by Kasper Hesselbjerg by chef Sarah Tyler, in collaboration with Antonin Simon:
Œuf au vin (Pre-), Divination Liver (Pain au foie), Fortune Cookies (Have as Many as You Like), Monster Energy Drink Delivered by UberEats*

In conjunction with the exhibition THE WALLS at cneai =, Kasper Hesselbjerg presents four new edible sculptures in collaboration with chef Sarah Tyler and Antonin Simon. Each dish also constitutes an ‘image’ for his ongoing series of collages, Chocolate Chip Sea Cucumber Atlas, which addresses how difference, similarity, and perhaps most importantly, distance play a role in creating meaning. Thus, these dishes are cooked to be part of a new discursive and speculative thought not necessarily related to the cosmology from which they usually originate. The four new dishes evoke ways of imagining the future. An Œuf au vin as a pre-coq au vin, a potential, forthcoming, or perhaps sacrificed before term. A liver sofa inspired by Etruscan haruspices for today’s diviners. Fortune available at will, and a surge of energy to become independent in a future determined by algorithmic thought, without health benefits.

Walls
Ten walls in the form of double pages explore the three levels of capturing reality, its reproduction, and its recording: digital, real, and reproduction.
Featuring works by François Aubart, Fia Backström, James Lee Byars, Continuous Project, Koenraad Dedobbeleer, Documentation Céline Duval, Pascal Doury, Peter Downsbrough, Antoine Duchenet, Jacob Fabricius, Jef Geys, Nicolas Giraud, Thomas Hirschhorn, Karl Holmqvist, Manuel Joseph, David Jourdan, Ben Kinmont, Alison Knowles, Ferdinand Kriwet, Lefevre Jean-Claude, Christophe Lemaitre, M/M (Paris), Clara Meister, Aleksandra Mir, Vera Molnár, Antoni Muntadas, Camille Pageard, Aurélie Pétrel, Seth Price, Conny Purtill, Lee Ranaldo, Allen Ruppersberg, Claude Rutault, Yann Sérandour, Leah Singer, Tatiana Trouvé, Julie Vayssière, and others.

SECONDroom
by Christophe Floré and Antoine Duchenet
Series of postcards created by artists who contributed to Cneai’s research: A Constructed World, Koenraad Dedobbeleer, Documentation Céline Duval, Conny Purtill, Lee Ranaldo, and Leah Singer.
A SECONDroom x Cneai collaboration

Exhibition Literature
A binder by Lefevre Jean Claude. (Ed. cneai =)

Free Editions Kiosk
Nicholas Vargelis, Martin Desinde, Belle Vue (Copie), Installation/Performance, 2022.
Belle Vue (Copie) kiosk is a free self-publishing workshop that allows exhibition visitors of THE WALLS to create a free bootleg of the BELLE VUE book. In addition to a selection of book double pages, Nicholas Vargelis and Martin Desinde offer a public writer service to enable visitors to reveal their own reflections and impressions about the exhibition. In line with the reflections addressed in BELLE VUE, Nicholas Vargelis and Martin Desinde view the editorial space of Belle Vue (Copie) as an extension of the exhibition space.
Open to everyone on Wednesdays and by appointment: edition@cneai.com

THE WALLS
The autumn exhibition at cneai =, THE WALLS, explores the three levels of capturing reality, its reproduction, and its recording: digital, real, and reproduction. It aims to break the hierarchy of values between those who create the artwork and those who valorize it. By indistinctly presenting the artwork and its surroundings (document, theory, inspiration, critique…), this exhibition reverses hierarchical questions that oppose the object and the devices of its valorization. As all elements involved in the elaboration of an exhibition determine its reception, what makes the artwork and the surrounding comments are equally exhibited on the wall. This equivalence allows everyone the freedom to determine the value to give to things.

THE WALLS exposes an intense but discreet territory of creation, collaborative by essence, masked by the spectacular positions of the global market. To attempt to resolve the ambiguity of an artistic context in crisis that has been slow to adapt to the mutations of the contemporary world, a generation of curators and artists has developed new fields of production. Practices with low added value, transdisciplinary actors, shared authorities, short diffusion circuits, participative organizations, anchoring in technological news, revealed through a desire to publish, that is, to make public.

Driven by a need for contemporaneity, these “publishers” who are also artists, curators, or graphic designers, write a parallel art history adjusted to current artistic urgencies: fluidity, network, complexity of sources and exchanges, shared authority, new forms of transmission, mixed artistic practices of creation and interpretation. They occupy a multimodal experimentation field and play with the boundaries between visual, sound, writing, digital image, and moving image, as well as discriminations between document, comment, and artistic action.

As at each stage in art history, the appearance of new production and diffusion techniques has modified artistic experiences. Often mixed, they no longer obey a geography of exclusion between the one who creates the object (the artist), the one who valorizes the object (the curator), and the one who acquires the object (the collector). THE WALLS analyze the authoritative insertions at work when roles of authors, editors, collectors, curators, distributors, researchers…, are played by the same people and contribute to refreshing the artistic operation at each stage of the research-production-diffusion-collection chain.

These artistic forms of dissemination initiated in the 1960s via the artist’s book, the art of the score and protocol, are at the intersection of information and performance. They integrate the diffusion operation from their conception, break down the principle of cultural specialization, and, without questioning the artistic act, halt the market mechanisms for legitimizing art. It is difficult to imagine the current scope of this artistic field. Opposite to a marginal network, an aesthetic or thematic movement, or a militant adventure, this true research field is nourished by the new technological offer and the need to challenge the outdated standards of artistic diffusion.

Dedicated to published art, gesture, media-work, cneai = is a point of tension in an active territory, a place of contemporary investigation. If publishing means etymologically making public, one will understand that the modes of exhibition, transmission, diffusion, and reception of artworks were three fundamental indices of the activity. For the assimilation of art to luxury products has as its ultimate consequence, the forgetting or marginalization of the desire for emancipation through art and knowledge.

Film “THE WALLS, a chronicle of the exhibition”, 16 min. Directed and shot by Éric Darmon. In partnership with DRAC Île-de-France, Audiovisual Fund of the Ministry of Culture, © cneai =, 2022.

PRACTICAL INFO
{Exhibition from October 16 to December 16 2022 - Wednesday to Saturday, 2pm to 6pm}

PARTNERS
{Ministère de la Culture} {Région Île de France} {Ville de Paris} {ADAGP} {Communauté d'agglomération Seine-Eure} {Cité internationale universitaire de Paris} {Le Générateur} {Maison des arts de Grand Quevilly} {PERGRAPHICA} {SECONDroom}