PRESS RELEASE
Emo de Medeiros:
CHROMATICS
EXHIBITION: October 6th - November 3rd 2018
PRIVATE VIEW: October 6th, 2018, 12:30 – 2.00 pm
Artist Emo de Medeiros in conversation with curator Christine Eyene
Chromatics is an exhibition by Emo de Medeiros grounded in the necessity of a radical fight against racism, "radical" meaning that the fight must also be symbolic and conceptual, aiming at destroying racialization mechanisms that create automatic thinking and a mainly subconscious linguistic "apartheid".
The basis of the piece is a program randomly combining 200 three-to-five-letters most common nouns in the English language, thus generating 10 000 possible word couples. The program then randomly adds the words "black" and "white" thus generating 80 000 possible four words paragraphs or "stanzas".
The viewers can observe the drastic change when "black" and "white" are randomly added.
The exhibition is manifested in a series of mirrors, paper works, textile works and a video.
ABOUT Emo de Medeiros
Emo de Medeiros is a French-Beninese visual artist whose work encompasses a wide variety of media and interrogates the validity of given systems to inform and influence the ultra-contemporary world.
So far this year he exhibited in Video Brazil and the Dakar Biennale where his work ")U(", “‘A monumental arrangement of neons, surveillance cameras, screens and mirrors…" was noted by Philippe Dagen, veteran art critic for the French newspaper Le Monde as: "one of the most striking realisations at the Biennale”. In September, de Medeiros executed a new performance: "Ubi(s)", at the Pompidou Centre, Paris. Later this Autumn he will participate to the Casablanca Biennale (Morocco) curated by Christine Eyene; Lagos Photo (Nigeria) and Cosmopolis Pompidou/MJAC in Chengdu (China).
ABOUT Christine Eyene
Christine Eyene is a Research Fellow in Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire, a member of the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco’s Scientific Committee and a member of the Acquisition Committee of the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain (Frac) Reunion Island. In 2018 she curated:" Resist!" at Bozar Museum in Brussels and the Brussels Biennale for Contemporary Photography. She is the curator of the 2018 Casablanca Biennial entitled “Tales From Water Margins" which will reflect on Morocco’s geographic position at the crossroad of the Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa and Europe and “examine the country’s historical relationship with the notions of travel and transit.”
