Poésie Médium Art
The Pernod Ricard Foundation welcomes artist David Douard and anthropologist Frédéric Keck as part of the « Poetry Medium Art » cycle.
At the center of their approaches and practices, in very different ways, we find the passage from the living to the non-living, flows and viruses, as well as the action of their visual, social and political representations.
Which metaphors for which type of understanding and experience, would link then, the present (and future) pandemics to the space of creation and exhibition?
David Douard’s universe is based on language in its fragmentary and derived forms. Poems from the internet and anonymous words, most often marked by chaos, deviance, illness or frustration, become the vital fluid that feeds his sculptures, carried by their own mutations. His practice establishes another social space, hybrid, also in contact with digital technologies.
Recent institutions such as FRAC Île-de-France, Paris, 2020; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2019; KURA. c/o Fonderia Artistica Battaglia, Milan, 2018; Palais de Tokyo, 2018 and 2014; Kunstverein Braunschweig, 2016, as well as the Ricard Corporate Foundation, have presented solo and group exhibitions of his work.
David Douard’s two exhibitions O’ THEE LIL’ are currently on view at the Rodeo Galleries in London and Piraeus.
He was a resident at the French Academy in Rome, Villa Medici, in 2017-2018.
He is represented by Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.
Frédéric Keck is a historian of philosophy and anthropologist.
He has contributed to the re-reading of the history of French anthropology. His books include Lévi-Strauss et la pensée sauvage, PUF, 2004; Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, entre philosophie et anthropologie. Contradiction et participation, Editions du CNRS, 2008. He co-edited the volume of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ works in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2008.
His current highly acclaimed work, at the crossroads of the history of science, the sociology of risk, and the anthropology of nature, focuses on the norms of « biosecurity » for humans and animals, and the predictive forms of sanitary and ecological catastrophes.
He is the author, among others, of Un monde grippé, Flammarion, 2010; Les sentinelles des pandémies. Virus Hunters and Birdwatchers on China’s Borders, Zones sensibles; 2020; Signaux d’alerte. Viral contagion, social justice, environmental crises, Desclée de Brouwer, 2020.
He is currently director of research at the CNRS. He is organizing the exhibition Microbes at the Musée du quai Branly next June.
