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Centre culturel suisse de Paris

Obituary to Michel Ritter

It is with great regret that the Centre culturel suisse de Paris is announcing the death of its director Michel Ritter. The CCSP team would like to join in the great sorrow of his parting with his family and close friends.

Director of the Centre culturel suisse de Paris since September 2002, Michel Ritter was born in Fribourg in 1949. He started out as a self-taught artist at the beginning of the 70s, more particularly in New York where he lived for a few years. Back in Switzerland, he decided to concentrate on the work of others and founded the RB gallery, an independent space in Fribourg. In 1981, he organised the important Fri-Art 81 exhibition which was also presented in New York as Fri-Art made in Switzerland and whose impact enabled him to found the Contemporary Art Centre in Fribourg, which was based on the Kunsthalle model. He was director there till 2002, and in 2004, he received the Prix Art Frankfurt for the ambitious international programme he created in this institution.

Michel Ritter was very attached to the cross-disciplinary concepts he followed at the Centre culturel suisse de Paris, and was also artistic director for the Belluard Bollwerk International festival in 1986 and a member of its artistic committee for a number of years.

In 1996, he was awarded the Prix de mérite pour médiatrices et médiateurs d’art and in 2005 the Meret Oppenheim Prize awarded by the Federal Culture Office to leading personalities working in Swiss contemporary art, and true to his generous nature, he redistributed the cash prize that went with this award to three alternative exhibition places.

Commissioner of renowned international exhibitions, Michel Ritter was able to gain the confidence and friendship of all the artists he worked with and widen the influence of Swiss culture, that he was not content to be just national, but critical, demanding and part of a universal reflection. He will always remain a model of engagement, prospection and intuition and a man that believed “an artistic act to be like a political act”.

The Centre culturel suisse de Paris will continue to follow the programme put in place by Michel Ritter.

A good-bye ceremony will be held at the Cathedral in Fribourg (CH) on Thursday, 10 May at 2.30 pm.

A tribute is to be paid to him at the Centre culturel Suisse de Paris, 22 May at 6 pm.

For more information go to:

Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne

Orlan: Le Récit
At the Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne Métropole!

From May 26 to August 26, 2007

From May 26 to August 26, 2007, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne devotes to ORLAN the greatest retrospective ever organized on the artist’s work ; “ORLAN: Le Récit.” It is the opportunity to pay homage to the artist on the occasion of her sixtieth birthday, in her hometown of Saint-Etienne. For the vernissage on May 25 and to celebrate the thirtieth birthday of “Le Baiser de l’Artiste”, ORLAN will present a performance Hybrider et Recycler especially conceived for the exhibit in collaboration with Andrea Crews.

Curated by Lòrànd Hegyi and Eugenio Viola

Since the mid-sixties, ORLAN has journeyed through the most important art movements of her time as an extraordinary protagonist. “Her work – unclassifiable – moves beyond the many “posts” and “isms” of art history, and her unique style has always been that of a complex, irreverent, ironic, blasphemous, iconoclastic artist, for whom the provocation of flesh, the reverse of the body, art and life, the play of identity, the constant oscillation between the real and the virtual, reach the heights of poetry,” states Eugenio Viola, co-curator of the exhibit.

With a wide angle on the artist’s life and work, Le Récit builds a bridge between her past, summoned by the present of her research, and a future that promises to be long and fertile. Illustrating the various stages of ORLAN’s work, this retrospective beckons a rediscovery of the history of the artist’s body poetry, from the precious first plastic works of the early sixties when she began exploring the concept of “body-sculpture,” to the works linked to the feminist movement, all the while passing through the artist’s reinterpretation of Judeo-Christian iconography. A number of previously unseen works presented as part of the exhibit bear witness to an-depth review of the baroque metaphor in general, and of Bernini’s Saint Theresa in particular. This “hagiographic” declension of the “Art Corporel” (bodily art) is symptomatic of ORLAN’s artistic journey.

The retrospective also touches upon surgical-operation-performances conceived as original and provocative answers to the crisis of performance. In the early nineties, ORLAN transformed an operating room into an artist’s studio in which an artwork was produced, thus inaugurating the mutating paradigm of contemporary art - a progressive return to “bodily” themes - in a direct relationship with new technologies and biotechnology. The appropriation of plastic surgery as a creative art form, both as subject and object of the performance in which the “oeuvre-action” integrates the artist’s body, marks the passage of bodily art into carnal art in ORLAN’s work.

In the Self-Hybridation series (Pre-Colombian, African and the more recent ones on Native Americans), ORLAN continues her digital journey through the infinite possibility of physical identities. By using various canons of beauty and aesthetics from different times and places, the artist creates “living” totemic figures, almost tangible in their virtuality and fascinating in their disturbing appearance, and seductive in their artificial otherness.

Finally, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne Métropole presents Le Plan du Film, a work in progress, started in 2001 based on a concept by Jean-Luc Godard. The idea? To make a film “backwards,” as a destabilizing synthesis made up of autobiographical facts and fictional elements.

Thus, Le Récit connects ORLAN’s past and future works, revealing the intrinsic coherence of her multifaceted artistic research, striking in its extraordinary capacity for inquiry, which allows the artist constantly to renew her work and to remain at the cutting edge of innovation. It is that perpetual quest which characterizes this artist’s journey, and precisely what makes her one-of-a-kind in the vast horizon of contemporary art.

Catalogue :
Charta Editions, Milano
Book format: 21 x 30 cm
pages: 304
illustrations: 290

For more information go to: http://www.mam-st-etienne.fr

Palais de Tokyo

LA MARQUE NOIRE /
STEVEN PARRINO
RETROSPECTIVE, PROSPECTIVE

May 24 - August 26 2007

Opening May 24, 2007
8:00 pm to midnight.

This summer, the Palais de Tokyo devotes the entirety of its exhibition spaces to a program of and around the artist Steven Parrino entitled LA MARQUE NOIRE.

Steven Parrino, who died in a motorcycle accident in January 2005, is considered by many as a model of a radical and uncompromising artistic activity. Inspired by the artist’s ability to disregard the notion of categories and to place the collaborative process at the core of his practice, LA MARQUE NOIRE proposes a wide selection of overlapping exhibitions and events.

A triptych of exhibitions are on view : STEVEN PARRINO: RETROSPECTIVE 1981-2004; BEFORE (PLUS OU MOINS), an exhibition of artists who had a deep influence on Parrino; and BASTARD CREATURE, an exhibition of artists who Parrino supported and influenced that is based on two previous exhibitions that the artist curated himself, in Bregenz (2003) and Dijon (1999). In addition, LA MARQUE NOIRE includes a weekly schedule of performances, screenings, and lectures.

Steven Parrino made the apparently inconceivable junction between Pop culture and Greenbergian modernism, bringing together the aesthetics of Hell’s Angels and Minimal Art. If painting was dead, he believes in the life that thrives in the pieces of its leftover corpse. By presenting a large number of Parrino’s works and by inviting the artists who have influenced him, as well as the artists whom Parrino chose to exhibit, support, and with whom he often collaborated, LA MARQUE NOIRE becomes a universe that stretches from minimalism, tattoos, experimental films, and cartoons to industrial design, No Wave, and punk.

LA MARQUE NOIRE was conceived by Palais de Tokyo Director Marc-Olivier Wahler. Faithful to the collaborative spirit of Steven Parrino, other curators were invited to collaborate in the preparation of the various components of this program.

EXHIBITIONS /

STEVEN PARRINO, RETROSPECTIVE 1981 - 2004
A retrospective that gathers nearly one hundred major works by the artist.
May 24 to August 26, 2007

BEFORE (PLUS OU MOINS)
An exhibition of artists who influenced Steven Parrino: Vito Acconci, Kenneth Anger, Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, Frank Stella, Sturtevant, Andy Warhol.
May 24 to July 25, 2007

BASTARD CREATURE
Based on two exhibitions curated by Steven Parrino (in 1999 and 2003):Richard Aldrich, Cinema Zero, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Amy Granat, Richard Kern, Jutta Koether, Michael Lavine, Chuck Nanney, Amy O’Neill, Maï-Thu Perret, Blair Thurman, Elizabeth Valdez, Banks Violette, Andy Warhol.
May 24 to July 25, 2007

THURSDAYS AT LA MARQUE NOIRE
BLACK FLAG ON NO NEW YORK
Lectures, concerts, screenings every Thursday…

MATALIST MOMENT by Jutta Koether (24 May – 9:00 pm)
CINEMA ZERO by Amy Granat (31 May – 7:30 pm)
SPOKEN WORD by Lydia Lunch (9 June – 7:30 pm)
BLACK FLAG by Daniel Colson (14 June – 7:30 pm)
BLAZK NOISEBY John Armleder and Mai-Thu Perret. (21 June – 7:30 pm)
NEW ORDER by Peter Saville (28 June -7:30 pm)
GRAFOLOGY (05 July- 6:00 pm)
SOME NOISE by Olivier Lamm (12 july – 7:30 pm)
MERZBOW by Masami Akita; With K-oZ (19 July – 9:00 pm)

MODULES/
Adriana Garcia Galan : Programme de gouvernement (May 3 – June 3)
Lonnie Van Brummelen et Siebren De Haan: Monument en sucre (May 3 – June 3)
Exhibition by the artists of Le Pavilon (June 7 – July 1)
Carte Blanche au Commissariat : Lucas Langlet (July 5 – July 25)
Claire Fontaine (July 5 – July 25)

WINDOWS/
Olivier Mosset invites artists to project films on one of the windows, for screenings that are visible from the street. For LA MARQUE NOIRE, New York artist Amy Granat presents The Saints (2006/2007), a series of six 16mm films she made in collaboration with artists Fia Backström, Jutta Koether, Amy O’Neill, Mai-Thu
Perret et Angel Turner.

PALAIS DE TOKYO /
13 avenue du Président Wilson
75116 PARIS
+ 33 (1) 47 23 54 01/36 86
http://www.palaisdetokyo.com

Open every day noon to midnight except Monday.

For more information go to: http://www.palaisdetokyo.com