The highway is the subject of the latest group exhibition at Le BAL, S’il y a lieu, je pars avec vous (If There’s Room, I’ll Ride With You). Five artists, Sophie Calle, Julien Magre, Stéphane Couturier, Alain Bublex and Antoine d’Agata, share the billing on this amazing project developed by Le BAL director Diane Dufour and curator Fannie Escoulen with the support of long-time BAL partner Vinci. Each artist shares his or her creations, worlds and stories, combining innovation, conceptualism, intimacy and humor.
Almost like a video game—an expression borrowed from the artist himself—Alain Bublex opens the exhibition by immersing the viewer in an atmosphere between the artificial and the real, with roads, walls, bridges and rest areas digitally inserted into motorway landscapes. Stéphanie Couturier has created a kind of vertical landscape puzzle, while Antoine d’Agata’s 36-day highway journal is presented day-by-day with three elements every time: a landscape, several mysterious, intimate photographs, and an illegible text on a sheet of white paper.
For Julien Magre the highway is conducive to fiction, and his photographs tell the story of his two girls, Louise and Suzanne, and his wife, Caroline. The four of them set out in search of imaginary adventures and unlikely encounters with people, places, objects and animals.
Animals can also be found in the fabulous work of Sophie Calle. Working with Vinci, Calle took archive footage from surveillance cameras featuring rodents, birds and deer, sequencing them in a way that followed their journey. Then she posed as a tollbooth agent in Saint-Arnoult, asking motorists the question: “Where can you take me?” The responses included, “Not too far, it’s expensive,” to, “To the end of the world, but you have to ride in the back with the dog.”
Funny and touching, this exhibition sheds light on the potential of the imagination of these five artists, and should be an inspiration to us all in making something out of nothing.
Read the full article on the French version of L’Oeil.
