In Gallery 2, I have chosen to hang the works on a wooden structure built to look like a display shelf. Even the backs are visible, evoking the obvious eagerness of something awaiting approval. This solemnity may remind some of an ancestral hall: the plastic flowers, the readymades, and the destroyed crate in the gallery show us a past serenity. The space guides viewers into the work, so that they can sit anywhere and examine the details more closely. The theatrical works are placed at the feet of visitors, turning the artist and museum into passive participants. I made 36.7°C in 2018, before Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine. The sense of upheaval in the world order has permeated all of Europe—these works are based on our history, and the rational analysis conveyed by visual images tell us our future.

Turning toward Gallery 2+ on the left side, we find It’s Nice to See You. This work offers poems to a series of “dead” objects, eulogizing them. The verses praise the beauty of these things while they were living, extolling their functionality and sharing disparate views on these objects held by people from different cultural backgrounds. We have to look down at the floor to see the humorous pairings of readymades and text, as well as the unfair treatment of these objects that results from a lack of clear definitions. It is a bit like my past work Floating Event, which shows objects and letters lost in the fast-paced systems of international shipping. They had been immersed in seawater or subject to other forms of slow deterioration. Modern people understand freedom in an almost animal way: food should be uncontaminated, people should not be deprived of their time, places with water should have fish, and places with earth should have grass. The breakneck pursuit of speed is in the past, and the remaining crate looks a bit awkward.

Now we come to Gallery 3. In Punished You and Me, I painted every square by hand to emphasize the repetitiveness of labor. This task could be performed by machines or AI, but the imperfections in the details show that the work was made by a human hand. This work has a strong sense of nostalgia: the colors, the aesthetic, and even the way the edges of the images are treated imitate the color coding of early industrial printed materials. However, in these works, the codes are replaced with key phrases from current events.

The starting point for O’t’kappa is a small poem on paper, but it becomes a large shell in a state of metamorphosis. In this sculptural work, my intention was to make the poem tangible in the form of a cultural presence, an installation, or even architecture. I also use the sticker aesthetic of poems written and stuck on metal poles and railings in the street a lot. This anecdotal form of expression from the street is as much “readymade” as it is sculptural. In contrast, the curtains in the exhibition are work curtains, used by businesses to divide office spaces. I really like the idea of appropriating this administrative structure, which, in my opinion, is actually a form of alienation from work.

Using Anglicisms in the titles of my works is a universal way of communicating information. It allows me to distance myself from my mother tongue, which is French, and to make it more international. I am also very interested in the sound of words and their complexity. This has a lot in common with rap music too. The transformation of language in my practice is related to Dadaism, Lettrism, and Surrealism, but my approach is a little more pop. I don’t follow any particular protocol about sculpture in general. I use recurring frameworks, which are the materialization and physicality of the digital world, technology, social networks, screens, and the Internet. I try to formalize this in sculptures through a variety of different elements, such as the materiality of aluminum, but also the webcam, that black orb on our phones and computers: in the exhibition, I make this tangibly present in the form of a black glass ball that functions as an all-seeing eye.

(The voice in this audio was written by the artist in French and translated and recorded by the exhibition staff.)

The sculpture Canary feel it incorporates older pieces—aluminum figures, to be precise, which are based on a test model of a face that I 3D-printed using software. They take up the idea of the mask—a little like the Joker mask, but different in this case because there is no reference to popular culture, it is simply a face that I drew with the aim of creating a character that could demand a liquid substance with its mouth. That’s why its mouth is open all the time, it’s waiting to be fed. For me, these faces became representatives of a kind of anonymity. This mask of a character I created in my universe is totally different from the masks of popular culture, and I drew it as a figure that was half-baby, half-old person, like a Chimera.
The work is called Canary feel it, which relates to this idea that the cage structures us, like something we have integrated into our own bodies. It’s like an appropriation of that which constrains us—public space, the cage, all that—but which nevertheless allows us to exist. That’s why I can really understand the fascination with graffiti, because for me graffiti can only exist through its structure, which is also its constraint.
Aluminum is a material that is used in manufacturing and also serves a function in our daily lives. It is not like bronze; it is a material that is very modern and that has a practical purpose. It is useful in the industrial sector. I collect aluminum from the street, where it is in things used to reconstruct buildings or make technological materials. And then they become these porous, often fragile forms. I’m interested in this material because I want to understand it and to give it another function that is more touching, poetic, and subjective. I really like this idea of hacking materials: this is a material that can be reclaimed and reshaped and given a new lease on life.
(The voice in this audio was written by the artist in French and translated and recorded by the exhibition staff.)

In Melody, we see a picture that I found on the Internet when I was looking for a very basic JPEG image from the image libraries related to my research on rumor and gossip. This picture can be considered a form of reclaiming the concept of the advertising image, which always gives a very clear message. Here, I wanted a much more subjective and abstract message. I wanted this act of transmission between the mouth and the ear to be interpreted by the viewer as something that haunts the space, the things that are being said at that precise moment. It’s very much inspired by my text searches online, which are only rumors of poems on the Internet that exist somewhere but are never read in their entirety when they are found. The reason I concealed part of it was to make it more open-ended and haunting, and that’s what the image represents: the appropriation of this communication between the mouth and the ear. What is being whispered like a rumor?
(The voice in this audio was written by the artist in French and translated and recorded by the exhibition staff.)

Liu Shiyuan: “When I first conceived Green Blanket Dream, I decided to do all of the pre-production myself. Compared to working with a team, working as a single person involves a very different attitude and approach toward clumsily solving practical problems. This ‘stubbornness’ is also reflected in my desire to equate garbage and flowers through the film’s style, imbuing the garbage with functionality and aesthetic value and placing it on equal footing with flowers.”

The admiration and respect for photography manifested in this work reflect a secret dialogue between Liu Shiyuan and her camera. She both shoots and acts in the film, creating the conditions for feeling joy and pain. Unlike a documentary, Liu is acting the part of the woman in this film. She lives on the boundary of dreams and reality—dreams are long, but reality is quite short. It seems as if there are only three hours in her day, but she still has a lot to do. Every day, she has to buy fresh flowers to put in plastic bottles, in order to preserve that sense of life. However, there is never enough time to do these things every day; almost as soon as she leaves the house, the sun starts setting. In her world, she is never allowed to catch up. She is far away from anyone else, and her life comprises only trivialities. In her mind, there are vast, diverse landscapes, and she can always see someone in the distance, both present and absent.

Eighteenth-century feminist philosopher and author Mary Wollstonecraft opposed the likening of women to flowers, which was a trope used by thinkers such as Carl von Linné, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Erasmus Darwin. This perceived weakness of women is challenged in this piece. Through repeated images of fresh flowers and women’s hands, this new video work does not push women forward; it expresses their strength. While recognizing the past relationship between flowers and women, the piece highlights the fragility of humanity’s connections to time, space, and nature.