Tous Cannibals
12 February - 15 May 2011
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| © Will Cotton
Consuming Folly, 2009-2010
private collection, Belgium |
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TOUS CANNIBALES
12 February - 15 May 2011
"We are all cannibals. The simplest way to identify with another is
still to eat them." Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Repubblica, 1993.
Curator: Jeanette Zwingenberger
Makoto Aida, Pilar Albarracin, Gilles Barbier, Michaël Borremans,
Norbert Bisky, Patty Chang, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Will Cotton,
Wim Delvoye, Erik Dietman, Marcel Dzama, James Ensor, Renato
Garza Cervera, Francisco de Goya, J. J. Grandville, Sandra Vasquez
de la Horra, Pieter Hugo, Melissa Ichiuji, John Isaacs, Oda
Jaune, Michel Journiac, Fernand Khnopff, Frédérique Loutz,
Saverio Lucariello, Alberto Martini, Philippe Mayaux, Patrizio Di
Massimo, Théo Mercier, Yasumasa Morimura, Vik Muniz, Wangechi
Mutu, Álvaro Oyarzún, Giov.Battista Podesta, Odilon Redon,
Félicien Rops, Bettina Reims, Toshio Saeki, Cindy Sherman, Dana
Schutz, Jana Sterbak, Adriana Varejâo, Joel-Peter Witkin, Ralf
Ziervogel, Jérôme Zonder.
From February 12th to May 15th, la maison rouge is staging an exhibition
on anthropophagy and its representations in contemporary visual art.
The exhibition’s curator has chosen pieces for the most part by young
artists working independently of each other on the concept of
incorporation. A body of contemporary works (photography, video,
installation, sculpture, drawing and painting) finds echoes in a
historic perspective (illustrations, illuminated texts,
engravings and ritual objects). Together, they show how the theme of
anthropophagy has persisted and evolved through time and place.
Despite being largely ignored by art critics and theorists,
anthropophagy is an underlying theme of current creation, as the
presence in the show of major artists from the contemporary scene
confirms.
Leaving aside images of gore, Jeanette Zwingenberger has chosen artists,
almost half of whom are women, who address the cruelty of anthropophagy
from a critical standpoint and with a certain delicacy. Dreamlike
representations voice and develop the questions that surround this
notion.
In an age of cloning, organ transplants and virtual worlds, when the
integrity of the body has been thrown into doubt, these artists reveal
how perceptions of the body have changed. They take the body apart,
transforming and reconstructing it as a hybrid organism; one that both
eats and is eaten.
Do we not absorb and devour our peers as we construct and share with
them our individual self? As Claude Lévi-Strauss observes in a quotation
which the curator highlights: "We are all cannibals. After all, the
simplest way to identify with another is still to eat them." (La
Repubblica, 1993).
Tous cannibales invites us to lift the veil on a disturbing, repressed,
even taboo subject that has implications for ethnology, history,
psychoanalysis, medicine and religion.
The exhibition will continue in Berlin, from May 28th to September 18th, at Me Collectors Room Berlin (www.me-berlin.com), recently opened by the collector Thomas Olbricht.
www.lamaisonrouge.org
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