TOURIST

Indeed, she works on two fronts, a personal creation and a collective structure, the Milkshake Agency, an office-studio that also serves as gallery and publishing house whose limits and participants keep changing. These activities, which most artists keep separate, are completely interwoven for her. Such open and unapologetic porosity of the personal and the collective shows in the exhibition. Its title, « Tourist », is in fact borrowed from the work of another artist, Christian Robert-Tissot, whom Alexia Turlin has invited along with other Swiss artists (Nicolas Faure, Angela Marzullo, Didier Rittener and Denis Savary). For Alexia Turlin, this first personal exhibit in Paris might as well be a group show in which she would act both as organizer and invited artist.

Here again, the young artist takes full responsibility for the sense of vacancy produced by the exhibition: while it is in good taste to dismiss the lazy and sheep-like situation of tourists, the Milkshake Agency’s agitator invites us to a shaking experience through a more or less mountainous landscape that brings to mind – surprise! – a strange, zen idea of Switzerland, at once familiar and aloof, sometimes disquieting, undoubtedly exotic.

Indeed, when Jean-Paul Felley and Olivier Kaeser, the co-directors of the center for contemporary arts Attitudes de Genève, invited her to add her own contribution to the insular landscape formed by the exhibition platform Offshore, Alexia did modify its general aspect with a wall-painting that owes both to abstract pop art and stylized sunrises. A few months later, when Mamco director Christian Bernard invited her for a show in Les Arques, a small village in southwestern France, she continued this insular adventure in her own way, announcing on a billboard the ongoing construction of Offshore, an international production center. It thus only makes sense that Alexia Turlin and her Milkshake Agency would take a one-way round trip through the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, which has consistently shown interest in art scenes abroad. With her exhibition-expedition « Tourist, » she invites us to new wanderings.