Brognon Rollin, Ferenc Gróf, Alex Hanimann, Basim Magdy, None Fútbol Club - Eight O'Clock in the Morning - Exhibitionmfc-michèle didier | Paris - Brussels - PARIS

Exhibition from February 9 to April 3, 2021
Opening on February 6 from 12pm to 6pm

«At the end of the show the hypnotist told his subjects, "Awake." Something unusual happened.»
Ray Nelson, Eight O'Clock in the Morning, 1963

The exhibition takes its title from Ray Nelson's novel that served as the basis for the adaptation of John Carpenter's movie They live. Based on a principle of altered perception, the main character discovers reality in a new way following a hypnosis session, revealing a world and its inhabitants that were hidden until his "awakening".

The project gathers 5 artists or duos whose works could be tied to a kind of relativity, by producing or enhancing the distance between an object and its perception, a reality and the way it is perceived. If the reality can be defined as the whole of the perceived or existing phenomena, these are subjected to the interpretation of the subject, but also to anagogical or scientific or social practices trying to circumscribe them, or to re-interpret them continuously.

The works presented could be perceived according to different approaches, questioning this gap between the object, its reading or its commentary, at the same time historical, semantic or linguistic, while allowing a more speculative framework of divination or intuition, of re-enactment or as science-fiction or speculative realism.

Most of the works articulate an ambivalent or polysemic relationship between text and image, each of which can appear as a form of metadata of each other, in the same way a caption or a subtitle do.

 

Brognon Rollin, recently presented at the MAC VAL, is an artist duo composed of David Brognon and Stéphanie Rollin. Born in Belgium (1978) and Luxembourg (1980), they live between Luxembourg and Paris. Their work proposes a dialectic of confinement and emancipation, dealing with so-called «sensitive» subjects, such as addiction or detention, referring the individual to her/his own condition and different social and political contexts. Their works take the form of sculptures and installations, but also of performances or two-dimensional works, always setting a narrative content or putting in place a certain form of narration or in-situ creation.

Famous People Have No Stories is a series of photographs of the hands of statues of historical figures. By proposing a form of retroactive chiromancy, and potential temporal paradox, this series evokes the question of determinism and supposed destiny. Different historical figures are represented in the series. In Classified Cloud, an evaporating cloud was photographed at five stages of its disappearance. Each image was published in the classified ads section of five different newspapers around the world. The work reconstructs the sequence by presenting the five pages of torn-out newspapers and produces a quasi-cinematographic effect, by fragmenting the subject but also by proposing a form of abstraction in relation to the information deployed in each of the newspapers. 

Ferenc Gróf was born in 1972 in Pécs, Hungary, and lives and works in Paris. His work questions ideological and historical imprints, through works at the intersection of design, graphic design and typography. He deals with different fields of research related to biology or geography as well as to economy, politics or architecture. A founding member since 2004 with Jean-Baptiste Naudy of Société Réaliste, his recent research focuses on the Anxiocene, the work of typographer Geoffroy Tory, and the François Joseph archipelago in Russia.

Our Rogue State proposes a historical reconsideration of the concept of the «rogue state» - a state that does not respect the most essential international laws, organises or supports attacks, or systematically violates human rights - by concealing a set of pictorial fragments representing founding events of different European nations in the ornamentation of the text, accents and cedils of the so-called «extended» Latin alphabet.

I (After Kruger) is the remake of a work by Barbara Kruger, in which Ferenc Gróf has substituted her hand with his and deconstructed the original slogan «I shop therefore I am», leaving it to collapse in on itself. Finally, USD Camouflage is the conversion of a US Dollar note into a camouflage pattern.

Alex Hanimann was born in 1955 in Switzerland. He lives and works in St. Gallen and Zurich. His work integrates both image and language through drawings, paintings, photographs and sculptures. His work sets up a serial process of reproduction and repetition, integrating different formal or syntactic variations, which question a gap between reality, a fact or a statement and its representation.

The drawings presented in the exhibition are a set of graphic, typographical and linguistic variations playing with different mechanisms of reasoning applied to different hypotheses and propositions.

Basim Magdy was born in 1977 in Assiut, Egypt. He lives and works in Basel, Switzerland. A painter by training, he has nevertheless produced a number of videos, installations and photographic works, revolving around observation and an attempt to interpret and read the different elements observed, playing as much on a scientific as on a personal level and assuming as much a political as a metaphysical dimension.

The Every Subtle Gesture series is the result of a collection of photographs by the artist begun in 1998. The artist has tried to interpret these images a posteriori by captioning them with texts from his imagination, historical events, or poems written between the ages of 17 and 21. The series is characterized by a form of fatalism and soon-to-come apocalypse, and constitutes a form of fragmentary narrative.

Nøne Futbol Club is a duo of artists created in 2009 in Paris. Borrowing from a certain form of popular culture and humour, their work is characterised by a continuous observation and attention to the city, producing a series of works organised in series and directly echoing urban issues: the relationship to law and order and to public space, or to vandalism, but also a number of proposals echoing popular subjects such as bodybuilding and cosmetic surgery, tuning...

Hot wheels is a series of works by Nøne Futbol Club playing on the name of a brand of children miniature cars and on a literal interpretation of the franchise title. If the American brand Hot wheels originally takes its name from a desire to represent speed by the evocation of wheels heated by asphalt, the work here interprets it literally in a perfect form of hot and burning wheels. In 2011 Nøne Futbol Club started a series of toroidal-shaped charred wooden sculptures imitating the general shape of a tyre. The charring of the wood simulates all the tyre's characteristic grooves and then paints them deep black, producing a striking trompe l'oeil effect. In the same spirit, Work n°079: Drop it like it's hot, reproduces in metal some bird slits on the ground. In Work n°068: French Cancan, diverts a press photograph, of an aggression with a Molotov cocktail into a potential choreographic movement associated with the French Cancan.

A second part of the exhibition will be presented on the occasion of Artgenève 2021.
(dates to be confirmed)