FIAC Hors les murs 2017
The annual event Hors les murs programmed by the FIAC (Foire internationale d’art contemporain de Paris – Paris International contemporary art fair) occupies several Parisian sites and offers an itinerary of outdoor works.
After Ugo Rondinone’s white olive trees in 2016, the guest of honor this year on Place Vendôme is American artist Oscar Tuazon. Une colonne d’eau (2017) is composed of four monumental sections of PVC pipes (the largest one is 7 feet wide and 28 feet long) installed several yards apart.
Tucked inside these hollow pipes are trunks of trees from the Bois de Vincennes. With this installation, Oscar Tuazon exposes the city’s water infrastructure and lets the viewer imagine the underground network of pipes that allows the circulation of water throughout the metropolis. This irrigation system, which is reminiscent of the venous and artery system of the human body, brings life to the city of Paris, as it would to a live organism. But as with Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, no city is recognizable and yet each one of them recognizes itself in the others. This is a sculpture that illustrates the artist’s interest for environmental issues and in particular for water consumption.
The Jardin des Tuileries, a must-see in Hors les murs, offers an itinerary that includes twenty-five outdoor works. Installations, sculptures, and performances stretch between the garden’s basins and lawns. Students of the Ecole du Louvre provide mediation services during the one-week-long event.
German artist Katinka Bock occupies the garden inside the Musée Delacroix. Inspired by the painter’s way of organizing space and make it conducive to creation, Katinka Bock created a corpus of six works that not only interact with the exhibition space but also with its history, through images, symbols and customs.
To conclude on outdoor works, after being rejected by the Louvre because “legends on the internet go around and attribute this artwork to a vision that is too violent and that might not be well received by our traditional audience of the Jardin des Tuileries”1 explains President of the Louvre Jean-Luc Martinez, Joep Van Liesdout’s Domestikator ended up in front of the Centre Pompidou. “Obscene, pornographic? Well, unfortunately obscenity and pornography are everywhere. But certainly not in this work of art”, claims director of the Centre Pompidou Bernard Blistène in front of the British press. 2 In a short article published in the French magazine Le Point, the artist says he is “happy that visitors of the Centre Pompidou get a chance to experience this work and hopes that it will generate a dialogue on the complexity of domestication in our society.” 3
1 Source Le Monde
2 Source The Guardian
3 Source Le Point
