On the ground and in the atmosphere, as both an element and a resource, water constitutes us and overflows the world. Protean in form – rain, seas, droplets, dew, streams, clouds, fog, and tears – it is the essential source of all life. Diverted, extracted, and polluted, water has now become a vital issue in the ongoing ecological crisis. But although it has been conquered, the abyssal depths remain today more mysterious than the Moon, land of dreams, inhabited by fantastic monsters.

This exhibition follows the cycle of water, from sunken civilizations to ritual practices and the troubled waters of trade routes. The hybrid figure of the siren or mermaid, by turns malevolent and protective, half woman, half animal, acts as a guide to navigate between these worlds, from the depths to the surface. Her ambivalence resonates with that of water, a space of metamorphoses, between waters of rejuvenation and of doom.

The show invites us to explore the different states of water through the artists’ eyes, from its representation to its political implications, from the commodity transformed into a resource to the metaphorical quest for its source. Diving into this liquid world opens up a host of contradictions, when tales of water’s origins intermingle with those that conjure up future times in which it threatens us with flooding and drought, and sea levels rise while rivers run dry.

“Mermaids are part of our feminist history, and losing sight of this belonging leads us to consider them without correlating them to gender, species, race, humanity, (…) Mermaids force us to pay attention to the question of becoming, to that of life in threads of water that make the world permeable and connected, outside any fantasy of total purification. This should serve not as a model, but as a political, artistic, academic and, above all, ethical direction: becoming-sirens are intimately linked to our futures and to the reinvention of the subject in the age of our tragic ecologies”.

The new NW is inaugurated with the opening exhibition Ritual in Transfigured Time, named after the 1946 short film of the same name by Maya Deren (Kiev, 1917–New York, 1961). Deren, whose life was driven by a desire for freedom, was a guiding light for us in devising the exhibition and film programme, as well as the principles of our revitalised organisation: dialogue, collaboration, experiment and the breaking down of boundaries. Many of life’s changes are accompanied by rituals. Rituals help us to navigate liminal phases, the moments between two positions or roles. At the momentary threshold between the old and new NW, we celebrate this radical metamorphosis. Here, in this place, we invite artists to scrutinise, face up to and recreate realities, whether through enchantment or resistance. For Deren, transformation meant treading both paths: dance as poetic self-expression and as a form of liberation. The exhibition opens with Deren’s 16mm film Ritual in Transfigured Time. The film is a ‘documentary of the inner self’, as the artist herself described it. In Deren’s view, ritual dance brought about a ‘depersonalisation’, where the dancer, supported by the community, could be liberated from social and cultural limitations. In this work, the dancing body assumes the space to experience suppressed freedoms once more without limit, to escape from the oppression of the everyday.

Gaëlle Choisne presents a tear-shaped stage and a film made together with dancer Kettly Noël and guitarist Daniele Morelli following the principles of improvisation and transfiguration. Carlotta Bailly-Borg presents an installation with sandblasted glass doors referring to the notion of the momentary threshold, as well as a series of paintings of timeless, forward- flowing figures. Onyeka Igwe interweaves colonial archive footage with her own visual language in an attempt to reclaim Black dance from the colonial project. Ula Sickle explores the concept of a ‘cinematic camera’ in recordings of dance rehearsals for her performance Holding Present, which was a collaboration with Ictus, the Brussels-based ensemble for contemporary music. Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca show how Frevo, a traditional Brazilian dance, places the self-representation and autonomy of the dancer first. Darius Dolatyari-Dolatdoust treats the costume like a score that grants the performer a new sensory perception of their body. (LA)HORDE offers a contemporary take on dance as ritual within the context of music festivals, collective joy and mass consumption. None of the artworks in this opening exhibition use spoken language; instead, it is only the body that speaks. Under circumstances where speaking becomes pressured or even impossible, artists have been known to find other ways to open doors and let in the unknown.

Authors: Godart Bakkers, Laura Herman

Gaëlle Choisne will present the Frankfurt debut of her long-term project “Temple of Love” (2018-ongoing) and transform the historic Villa 102 into an art space. A meticulous collector of objects acting at the margins of photography, the artist weaves individual memories with social observations to create eclectic installations, videos and performances. Drawing on her personal history and French-Haitian heritage, Choisne’s works often delve into themes of self-healing, spirituality and social interaction. Choisne regards her artistic practice as part of a network of ideas and people, frequently engaging in collaborations and integrating literary and scholarly allusions into her work. For the “To Hide” edition of the long-term project “Temple of Love”, the artist once again refers to a chapter from Roland Barthes’ “A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments”. The site-specific installation takes on a new form with each presentation. Choisne developed the exhibition for the first time during her one-year residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, in cooperation with KfW Stiftung.

The Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles is delighted to present Van Gogh’s famous “cosmic poem” Starry Night (Arles, September 1888), one of the masterpieces in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay. The arrival of this key work in Arles, just a few metres from where it was made, provides an opportunity to produce an exhibition that sheds new light on both the sources the artist drew on to create it and its enormous influence.

The exhibition Van Gogh and the Stars, curated by Jean de Loisy and Bice Curiger, takes into consideration the unique climate of the second half of the nineteenth century, both in terms of literature and science. Both artists and thinkers of the day influenced the popularity of astronomy, which spread notably through literary works by the likes of Victor Hugo and Jules Verne; at the same time, painters such as Jean-François Millet, Camille Corot, and James McNeill Whistler were fascinated by the effects of the night, the clear light of the stars, and knowledge of the cosmos.

Intellectuals of this period used words and images to illustrate their new discoveries – copies of astronomer Camille Flammarion’s writings, for example, sold in the hundreds of thousands in the time leading up to the creation of Van Gogh’s night scenes. Such discoveries were popularised by magazines that were hugely influential. Science fiction and bold metaphysical hypotheses added mystery and thrills to the craze and contributed greatly to the climate in which Vincent van Gogh’s nocturnal works were born.

The exhibition presents some of the research that fascinated the public of the time, including the work of great scientific illustrators such as Étienne Léopold Trouvelot and Lord Ross’s drawings of spiral galaxies which so resemble those of Van Gogh. This movement and the colours of the night were augmented by the advent of urban lighting, whose glow and reflections punctuate the famous view of the Rhône.

The influence of this nocturnal scene has been considerable, as shown in the work of subsequent artists such as Edvard Munch, Augusto Giacometti, Robert Delaunay, František Kupka, Kasimir Malevitch, Georgia O’Keeffe, Helen Frankenthaler and other major figures who are featured in the exhibition.

Van Gogh’s examination of the stars, however, is just as remarkable – we know that he studied them meticulously by the precise arrangement of the constellations in his paintings. In a letter to his brother Theo in July 1888, he imagines the stars as the refuge of the dead. This belief, which features prominently in para-scientific literature from the mid-nineteenth century, also influenced Van Gogh’s contemporaries, such as Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Odilon Redon, James Ensor, Wenzel Hablik, and Constantin Ciurlionis. A fascination with the night has persisted in contemporary art, where it has taken different forms. Works by Tony Cragg, Alicja Kwade, Anselm Kiefer, Mariko Mori, Gillian Brett, Alfred Smith, Dove Allouche, Yves Klein, Lee Bontecou, and others will also be included in this journey to the stars undertaken thanks to the return of Starry Night to the banks of the river that inspired it…

Conflictual borders, anti-migration walls, confinement, social distance, segregation policies—these seemingly dissimilar topics share a common point: space and its political organization. The main effect of climate change is the apparition of a new world map in which carbon dioxide and urban life, desertification and migration, deforestation and social struggles, destruction of animal ecosystems and vegetal invasions, have become brutally interconnected.

PANSORI: A Soundscape of the 21st Century is an operatic exhibition about the space we live in. But as any landscape is also a soundscape, this exhibition is built as a narrative connecting musical and visual forms. Having emerged in 17th century Korea, pansori is a musical genre deeply rooted in its native land. In Korean,pansori literally means « the noise from the public place, » which could also be understood as the voice of the subalterns. The 15th Gwangju Biennale intends to recreate the original spirit of pansori, with artists that try to re-think the space shared between humans, machines, animals, spirits, and organic life— our relational space.

CALM – Centre d’Art La Meute invites you to discover the first exhibition of its 2024-2025 cultural season. The title of the exhibition refers to the film “Born in Flames”, directed by Lizzie Borden (Detroit, Michigan, USA) in 1983.

The film had a profound effect on us, so we decided to design and build an exhibition around its narrative and environment. It depicts a clandestine women’ s army developing in a dystopian New Y ork. As social unrest shakes the streets, brigades of women on bicycles roam the grim urban landscape, fending off rapists in particular . But much of the dramatic tension stems from the efforts of women – racialized and white, queer and heterosexual, working-class and elite – to understand each other and work together .

Considered by cinema to be in the science fiction genre at the time of its release, its discourse is utterly contemporary and real forty years on. Its radicalism, typical of the essay genre, challenges and stimulates reflection on the workings of our society and the place violence occupies within it.

This exhibition brings together women who, in their respective work, bear witness to political links with film or aesthetic links with the genre of science fiction and under ground cultures. The exhibition’ s scenography is an urban mise en abyme, between dense and open spaces, oppressive and liberating, from the grid, a reproducible module, to open squares. The aim was to integrate the primordial and the futuristic, following the example of the generic city model (Rem Koolhaas) that is Manhattan.

A proposal and text by Oriane Emery & Jean-Rodolphe Petter

Temple of Love – Tutti Sistemati is a commissioned sculptural video installation that introduces a new version of Temple of Love. Inspired by Roland Barthes’s book A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977) and the chapter “Tutti sistemati”, this new work advocates for land preservation and promotes an ecological contemplation of our world: it addresses the complex relationship between Normandy and Haiti, revealing the history of Creole gardens, colonial pasts, and mythical tales. Through the perspective of créolité, the artist invites viewers to explore the crossroads of collective and personal histories while considering themes of genealogy, healing, resistance, empowerment, and gender in greater depth. Temple of Love stimulates reflections on the intricacies of this shared history and offers glimpses of hope for a more inclusive and sustainable future. Gaëlle’s guests for Temple of Love – Tutti Sistemati are Arvo Leo and Audrey Parisot. The images for the video are credited to Makoto C. Friedmann.

Gaëlle Choisne is a visual artist who engages with contemporary global issues through her multimedia practice. Her work reflects upon colonial history and the remnants of its political and cultural turmoil and exploitation of nature by incorporating Creole traditions, myths, and popular cultures. Her projects, especially Temple of Love (2022–24), operate as collaborative ecosystems that question societal norms and imagine new possibilities.

The precession of the equinoxes is an astronomical concept that describes the displacement of the axis around which our planet rotates, affecting the position of the stars as seen from Earth. It returns to its original point every 26,000 years: in astrology, this cycle is broken down by the twelve constellations of the zodiac to associate them with a particular era. So, we are in the process of leaving the age of Pisces for the age of Aquarius, with its virtues of abundance, transformation and hope. Under these cosmic omens, Gaëlle Choisne invites visitors to the Marcel Duchamp Prize to enter a large- scale installation showcasing her work as a video artist, sculptor and painter.

An indefatigable creator of artistic environments that go beyond the exhibition to include banquets, workshops, gardening, body treatments, concerts and performances, Gaëlle Choisne has been building an experimental, multi-faceted archipelago- work for the past ten years. Resolutely curious, her practice embraces a multitude of media and skills, which she hijacks creatively without concern for canon or tradition. A devotee of kitsch aesthetics, her works sweep everyday objects along with them (coins, cigarettes, key rings, false nails), talismans and other carefully collected finds. A builder trained in scenography, she manipulates industrial materials (plaster, concrete, silicone), ceramics and precious metals with the same affection. From this position of referential impurity2 that runs through her work, she deals with the question of the image and the archive as a ‘self-ethnographer’, in other words by tampering with colonial systems of representation through a practice of video and photography that is both reflexive and anthropological. In her films in particular, she allows herself to borrow the voice and tone of the coloniser, while at the same time hijacking its objects of study. Infused with Caribbean diasporic imaginations and a Haitian and French family history, Gaëlle Choisne’s work resonates with the Black Fantasy movement imagined by the British curator Ekow Eshun in a book and exhibition entitled Black Infinity. It brings together artists who find a generative tension between the everyday and the extraordinary to produce new narratives of Black potential. Black fantasy ‘testifies to the conviction that African cultural beliefs and practices are worthy of sincere, rather than sarcastic, consideration as sources of knowledge and creative inspiration’3.

At the Centre Pompidou, Gaëlle Choisne presents an immense carpet of ‘poured cork’ flooring on which five monoliths represent beehives, burrows or termite mounds. Adorned with intricate metalwork, chains and shells, these promontories house small video theatres showing five films made by the artist since 2020 during her travels in Haiti, the Caribbean and Latin America. Initially trained in the dramatic arts, this gesture of miniaturisation reflects her interest in Brecht’s reflections and in epic theatre, which aims to make the spectator aware of his position within the work. From this stellar observation station that plays with scale, the audience can examine a range of human activities: in L’école des actes, the collective fantasising and reclamation of journeys into exile in the Paris region; in Accumulation Primitive, a political and poetic feminist fable about Haiti; in Creole garden in Normandie, sensual gardening in which the plants are the main characters. At the back of the room, the huge paintings on wood from the Safe space for a passing history-Age of Aquarius 99999 series combine pictorial surges, glyphs and talismans with AI-generated faces of strangers. At once a tribute to the activists of the black liberation struggles and a fictional family tree, they act as a cosmogonic cartography that keeps us asking: where are we?

THOMAS CONCHOU