Documenting a video installation addressing the consequences of historical sea travel.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibitions at the CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, May 19 to September 4, 2016, and at the Jeu de Paume, Paris, from September 8 to October 23, 2016.
The Satellite programme of contemporary art exhibitions was started by the Jeu de Paume in 2007. Each programme is conceived by a curator of international renown (Fabienne Fulchéri, María Inés Rodríguez, Elena Filipovic,
Raimundas Malašauskas, Filipa Oliveira,
Mathieu Copeland, Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez and Erin Gleeson). Since 2015, this programme of exhibitions has been organized jointly by the Jeu de Paume and the CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux.
The ninth series, titled “Our Ocean, Your Horizon” and curated by Heidi Ballet, investigates the concept of oceanic identity—a sense of belonging that is shaped by an outward-looking prism and focuses on horizons and what lies behind them—in contrast to land-based identity, which hinges on the demarcation of finite space. In response to this proposal,
Edgardo Aragón engages with critical cartography,
Guan Xiao examines transformation and travel, Patrick Bernier & Olive Martin address the consequences of historical sea travel and
Basim Magdy evokes untold stories of the sea.
Each exhibition is accompanied by a publication that was conceived as a carte blanche for the artists. This series of books, each of which was created in close collaboration with a graphic design agency, forms an independent artistic space within the Satellite programme.
Patrick Bernier & Olive Martin have worked together since 1999, experimenting with forms as varied as films, performances, photographs and sound pieces, on a number of different projects, often in collaboration with professionals from other fields: lawyers (Sébastien Canevet and Sylvia Preuss-Laussinotte for X and Y vs. France: The Case of a Legal Precedent, Aubervilliers, 2007); storytellers (Carlos Ouedraougo for Quelques K de mémoire vive, 2003-2005, and Myriame El Yamani for Bienvenue chez nous, Residency album, Montreal, 2005); and an auctioneer (Steve Bowerman for Traceroute Chant, San Francisco-Paris, 2010). What they create are “monsters”, works where, through imprecision, hesitations and surprises, we become aware of the stratagems people willingly adopt to subvert their own language and form. This questioning of the individual's relationship to a territory of their own, a country, region or professional activity, is also the focus of their two films, Manmuswak (2005) and La Nouvelle Kahnawake (2010). In 2012, they created L'Échiqueté [“Chequered Chess”], a variant on the game of chess, which highlights the paradoxical situation of the half-caste in colonial history, as well as the ambiguous situation of the politically committed artist in the field of contemporary art.
