november 28 2015 • january 16, 2016
In the gallery, the works of Éric Duyckaerts and Qingmei Yao will dialogue around The Lesson.
From crazy conferences to pseudo-scientific realities, both question knowledge and its limits. Two generations and two distant origins for an unprecedented crossing around an omnipresent theme in their work: the Lesson. This will be the title of their exhibition. Éric Duyckaerts is the artist who perhaps best embodies “belgitude” in contemporary art. Representing Belgium at the Venice Biennale in 2007, this performer of the absurd loses us in all languages in his labyrinth, teaches us to count on “a hand with two thumbs”, revisits the alphabet book with a capital A or tracks down the invisible clues of a scene that never took place. As a mad scientist, his reality is as beautiful as the knots, rings and interlaces that abound in his poetic drawings, presented at the Espace A VENDRE alongside his videos. Caught between nostalgia for communism and the madness of capitalism, contemporary Chinese society is mishandled in the interventions of Qingmei Yao.
A few kilometers from Nice, she stands in the streets of the Principality of Monaco to sing the third verse of the Internationale. Totally unknown in our country, it is never sung in China because its lyrics (“The State oppresses and the law cheats, Taxes bleed the unfortunate; No duty is imposed on the rich, The right of the poor is a hollow word”) are considered too anarchist. It is equipped with the sign “Recruit beggar/homeless for a contemporary art fair” that she travels the streets of Marseille in the summer of 2015 for ART-O-RA-MA. Subjected to administrative and bureaucratic constraints, she will nevertheless manage to install the ideal candidate in the spans of the Fair for a whole weekend.drawings, videos, photos: the traces left by these two artists will be made available to the public in order to reconstitute two intellectual paths animated by the game and the delight of language.
