Work by Sookoon Ang.
After the fun experience inside the ‚tape installation of a physically immersive or psychologically penetrative quest begins.
Let yourself be overwhelmed by the museum building who looks like a convulsive mind/body organism who traces and confronts, like a strong art exhibition should do.
The tour starts with a sweet ‚forest’ installation, trees made by ripped cardboard, quickly followed by an intriguing ‚inside-outside’ set called Diagonal Section by Marcius Galan. A very basic trompe-l’oeuil: draw a line, simulate a window and let people decide for themselves to walk trough or not. Most of them DO NOT pass the line and make a detour. Chocking.
Further on: a room filled with wall scribbles, a red box with erotic mind sketches, a marble tent you can’t enter, the inside of a bear with survival package (Abraham Poincheval, who lived inside this life-sized bear sculpture, became one with the bear’s body and fed like a bear. This experience of extreme solitude and retreat from the world was filmed and transmitted via video. ), a wooden chaotic labyrinth built of rubbish leftovers (Belgian artist Peter Buggenhout) and a concrete bunker with steel construction on the outside, instead of inside the concrete. That’s for the first floor, see it as a warming up….
The journey continues with a descent into the cellars of the museum, trough a stairway decorated by black and white street art with hundreds of messages.
My first highlight? The monumental projections of Japanese teenage girls in school uniforms wear death metal-like painted masks. The video installation is built up around the adolescence of girls, and what is a particularly intense moment in the exploration of the self that needs to deal with doubt, anxiety, and a search for one’s identity
Discomfort and recognition you feel, entering this room are reinforced by the enormous photography and videos by artist Sookoon Ang.
Another strong one: Le Refuge by Stéphane Thidet is a wooden cabin, equipped basic mountaineers furniture, where it’s raining like hell inside. The inside becomes outside and a refuge turns into a hostile place.
There are many more work to see, I listed here some of them picture wise
I really liked the fairytale white tree forest of Christophe Berdaguer and Marie Péjus, who composed all white sculptures based on drawings made by patients during a psychological test in which they were asked to draw a tree. Amazing creatures came out of this, trees filled with people’s thoughts, fears and hopes.
Get Out of my Mind, Get Out of This Room (1968), was the last room at the end of the labyrinthine tour through the exhibition that blew me away. This sound installation by Bruce Nauman offers visitors an immersive experience bordering on claustrophobia. A work of great intensity that took me prisoned on one hand, and let me leave that same space liberated. (link http://vimeo.com/20309228)
A long, weird group show trip, worth taking.
Artists who participate at INSIDE are Jean-Michel ALBEROLA, Dove ALLOUCHE, Yuri ANCARANI, Sookoon ANG, Christophe BERDAGUER & Marie PEJUS, Christian BOLTANSKI, Peter BUGGENHOUT, Marc COUTURIER, Nathalie DJURBERG & Hans BERG, dran, Marcius GALAN, Ryan GANDER, Ion GRIGORESCU, HU Xiaoyuan, Eva JOSPIN, Jesper JUST, Mikhail KARIKIS & Uriel ORLOW, Mark MANDERS, Bruce NAUMAN, Mike NELSON, NUMEN/FOR USE, Abraham POINCHEVAL Araya RASDJARMREARNSOOK, Reynold REYNOLDS & Patrick JOLLEY, Ataru SATO, Stéphane THIDET, TUNGA, Andra URSUTA, Andro WEKUA, Valia FETISOV, and Artur ZMIJEWSKI.
Curators: Jean de Loisy, Daria de Beauvais, Katell Jaffrès
Inside at Palais de Tokyo from 20 oct till 11 jan 2015. Hurry up, go and live this one from the inside!
Kate
©ALL photos by Kate Stockman_THE SQUID STORIES