Fiction / Lectures performées #15
For this new evening of Fiction/Performed Readings, artist Mounir Fatmi presents My Beautiful Language, a 16-minute work composed through the technique of the cut-up popularized by Burroughs in literature. Sampling images from Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage with calligraphy, the video approaches language as an instrument of repression as well as communication.
Thomas Clerc will perform a new creation.
The evening will close with The Last Man Out, a performance by Fayçal Baghriche around a contemporary tragedy revisited in the form of a one-man show that adopts the format and the linguistic codes of television programs.
BIOGRAPHIES
Fayçal BAGHRICHE
Born in 1972 in Skikda in Algeria. Lives and works in Paris.
After receiving a degree from the Villa Arson in 1997, Baghriche became involved in various projects, such as artist residencies and curatorships (he co-founded Le Commissariat in 2006). He has developed a practice that privileges the forms of performance, photography, and video, pointing out the tacit stereotypes codifying exchanges between individuals. Reproducing scenes from our everyday environment, Baghriche introduces slight differences to better reveal automatisms in our language and behavior. In 2010 his work was exhibited at the Hôtel d’Albret as part of the Nuit blanche, at the Printemps de septembre in Toulouse, as part of Les Ruines du futur at the château d’Oiron, and at Retour vers le futur at the CAPC in Bordeaux.
Thomas CLERC
Born in 1965 in Paris where he lives and works.
Writer Thomas Clerc holds the agrégation in modern literature and is an assistant professor in contemporary literature at the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense. Influenced by Roland Barthes, Clerc edited Barthes’s course at the Collège de France, Le Neutre, in 2002. He made a name for himself in 2005 with the publication of his biography of Maurice Sachs, Maurice Sachs le désoeuvré (éditions Allia), in which he explores the myth of this former companion of Cocteau’s. He is also the author of Écrits personnels [« Personal Writings »], an essay on the difficult task of defining autobiography, Paris, musées du XXIe siècle (Gallimard) for which he was awarded the Renaudot prize in 2007, and L’Homme qui tua Roland Barthes et autres nouvelles [« The Man Who Killed Roland Barthes and Other Short Stories], L’Arbalète, Gallimard, 2010.
Mounir FATMI
Born in 1970 in Tangier. Lives and works between Paris and Tangier.
Mounir Fatmi’s work combines an aesthetic dimension and a critical edge towards all types of power. Fatmi’s work, which can take the form of videos, installations, drawings, paintings, or sculptures, underlines the accidents of our world, the hyper-density of the flows of information, as well as all contemporary violence in its many aspects: terrorism, the politics of fear, religious indoctrination, the domination of free-market ideology and policy. His work has been shown at the Migros Museum für Gegenwarskunst in Zürich, the Museum Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. In 2007 he took part in the 5th Gwangju Biennale, the 2nd Seville Biennale, and the 52nd Venice Biennale; in 2008 his work was featured in Paradise Now! at the Tate Modern, in Flow at the Studio Museum in Harlem (NY), and in Traces du Sacré at the Centre Georges Pompidou; it also appeared at the 10th Lyons Biennale in 2009 and at the FIAC in 2010.
