Collective Exhibition for a Single Body is a project initiated by
French curator Pierre Bal-Blanc in the context of documenta 14 in Athens.
The present book summarizes his research on how body, language and value
intersect. Bal Blanc extract gestures and body situations mostly from
conceptual artworks created in Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 80s. These
gestures, aiming at being interpreted and repeated, are assembled in a
score to be performed, pushing the boundaries between visual arts and
choreography.
The book documents how the score was performed in several
public
spaces, from the low-cost supermarket that has replaced the Generali
Foundation in its location in Vienna, to a social service office in
Leuven, Belgium (as part of the “Playground” festival).
Collective
Exhibition for a Single Body is also a template for a licence that
could frame how to value a score, a gesture, and its embodiment.
Works by Milan Adamčiak,
Geta
Brătescu, Anna Daučíková, Valie Export, Stano Filko, Tomislav
Gotovac, Sanja Iveković, Anna Jermolaewa,
Július
Koller,
Jiří Kovanda, Katalin
Ladik, Simon Leung, Karel Miler,
Paul Neagu, Manuel Pelmuş, Petr Štembera,
Mladen Stilinović, Sven Stilinović, Slaven Tolj, Goran Trbuljak.
Published on the occasion of the
exhibition “Exposition collective pour un corps individuel – La
partition privée” at gb agency, Paris, from the October 12 to November
5, 2019, and the “Playground” Festival, Leuven, from November
14 to 17, 2019.
Pierre Bal-Blanc is a French art critic and independent curator based in Paris and Athens. Editor-in-chief of the magazine Bloc Notes between 1998 and 2000, co-founder of the agency Design Mental, he directed the Contemporary Art Center of Brétigny-sur-Orge (Essonne) from 2003 to 2014. In 2017, he curated Documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens. One of the most prominent curators of the contemporary art scene, Bal-Blanc's focuses his practice on paradoxes of perversion and transgression, living and object, via industrialization and processes of production. His exhibitions have been displayed at: CAC Brétigny/ Micadanses, Stuk Leuven, Tate Modern London, MoMA Warsaw, and Berlin Biennale, among many others. In 2017, he curated Der Canaletto Blick – The Canaletto View, a commission program for Easter Group Bank AG at the Erste Campus in Vienna, and in the same year he published the book
Project Phalanstère (Sternberg Press, 2017).
