March 10 - 19 2010
Opening Tuesday 9th of March at 6 PM
Déjà vu brings together works of art and the successive commentaries concerning them
produced in the course of their previous exhibitions. Déjà vu is the result of a collective
curatorial endeavour led within an academic context and it focuses on the plurality of
discourses the works have inspired.
Whether descriptive, analytical, poetic or ambiguous, press releases and education kits, curatorial
texts and catalogue entries express a definite vision of the work and influence its perception.
While some works tend to be interpreted in a similar frame from one exhibition to the next,
opposing an inner resistance to the variations of the critical discourse, some others lend
themselves to a wide range of comments. Displaying not only the works, but also the discourses
around them, provides the opportunity to reflect on the impact the latter have on the works’
interpretations: how far can the perception of an artwork be transformed by its inclusion in a
thematic exhibition?
Is understanding of an art work easier if one proposes a multitude of ways in which it can be read
or, on the contrary, does this confuse the understanding still more? Do the discourses reveal the
substance of the work, or do they miss it completely? Through a sampling process, quotations
from texts of various origins have been collected in order to build a new whole, yet fragmentary
and with no possible claim to exhaustiveness. Rather than including the works in a predetermined
reading, they are left open to further interpretations.
Déjà vu explores the path of the works from one exhibition to the next and is thus a way to
approach the memory of these contemporary art exhibitions whose growing number continually
risks overwhelming the spirit.
A series of parallel events and a publication in editorial partnership with Semaine, review on
contemporary art, completes the exhibition.
Déjà vu is a project conceived by the 2010 class of the Master 2 Sciences et techniques de l’exposition of
the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, under the supervision of Françoise Docquiert and with the help
of the STartE association.
http://dejavu.univ-paris1.fr
http://asso-starte.blogspot.com