Group exhibition
Rhona Bitner, Alix Boillot, Thomas Cap de Ville, Garush Melkonyan, JD Rooney, Yue Yuan
Les Jardiniers, Montrouge
27 June—1 August 2025
What do objects tell us? The material turn has seen the development of a more active conception of the role of objects in our relationship to them—whether through collection, study, or exhibition—and therefore in their relationship to us. They are no longer inert masses waiting to be manipulated by intelligent and sovereign human agents. They bear traces of the intentions, ideas and behaviour of the latter, and can even powerfully shape human subjectivity and activity.
And yet, our sensitive experience is conditioned by a verbal device, which enables us to know, value, love and relate to things—and which encounters a number of limits. Sometimes, if not often, we come up against a mute object that resists the formulation of a commentary and leaves us perplexed at the threshold of language. So we lend the objects our words, our words, as we would interrogate a suspect to force him to say, not what he has to say, but the story we want to hear. In other words, storytelling threatens to substitute a narrative for experience, an interpretation for the object, and a fiction for reality.
The very idea that, in order to make the object speak, it needs to be opened up and laid flat, is fallacious. Once eviscerated, the goose that lays the golden eggs not only ceases to produce value, but still fails to reveal the mystery of its entrails. Perhaps we are beginning to see the opportunity for a narrative that starts with the object and its refusal to be transparent, and in which we can participate if and only if we accept that there is meaning in this interiority to which we are denied access and in what we do not yet know. It is because we subscribe to this pact of belief that a bird is a treasure. Without forgetting that we are entering into the domain of ‘as if’.
The exhibition context mobilises and concentrates, reinforces and undoes the dynamics of subject/object and viewer/viewed. A silent object can have meaning; a photograph, thought to have a universal language, doesn't tell the whole story. Whatever the case, let there be doubt.
Curated by Margaux Gillet & Estelle Marois
Installation views
1 - 4 © Les Jardiniers
5, 6 © Grégoire Borach
Yue Yuan
Pawlowski Sphere, 2024
Photo print on Hahnemühle paper, sphere cast in concrete from the Berlin Wall
1, 3, 4 © Yue Yuan
2 © Grégoire Borach
Rhona Bitner
Listen, 2006—2018
Chromogenic prints on aluminum
© Grégoire Borach
Alix Boillot
Rocky II, since 2021
© Grégoire Borach
Thomas Cap de Ville
Book 4, 2024
Mixed media
© Grégoire Borach
Garush Melkonyan
Visionaries, 2022
Sculptures in porcelain, wood, metal, paint, LED light, digital timer
© Grégoire Borach
JD Rooney
Techno Fragments, 2024
Silkscreen on aluminum, comb, rubber, speaker, cassette, ebonised hardwood
Buffer (Whittle Jet), 2025
Acoustic foam soaked in cocoa butter, cassette case, print
Buffer (Guyanese Indian Arms), 2025
Acoustic foam soaked in cocoa butter, cassette case, printing
Event Horizon, 2025
Silkscreen on aluminum, acoustic foam soaked in cocoa butter
Tilbury Riverside, 2025
Cassette cases, Stickytext print
© Grégoire Borach
Yue Yuan
Lector in Fabula, 2025
Performance
Performer: Félix Touzalin
© Chiang Seeta