AUTOMATIC REVOLUTION: MARTINE FEIPEL & JEAN BECHAMEIL
In 2014, the couple of Franco-Luxembourger artists presented at the gal- lery the installation called «A Perfect World» on architecture modernist and «utopian» of the 50s and 70s, and especially on the social dwellings of that time; Great Packages. The casts monumental buildings were em- blematic of this era, as well as the series of drawings «Last Blasts» reflected the end of a utopia. In 2016, in the exhibition entitled «A Hundred Hours from Home «, artists moved away from architecture to take an interest in objects of our daily lives, their talk was about modernity and about the contradictions it evokes in our contemporary society.
«Automatic revolution» is a wild and unlimited possession of industrial robotics and its uses for unproductive purposes. Beyond a purely intel- lectual theoretical approach related to the computer world, this is a ques- tion of a search for physical and practical experience. It tends to appro- priate machines and their programs and to use them in a roundabout way. It is, first of all, tools extremely modern technologies used in ad- vanced technology that are not normally in the public domain. All the means are valid for the appropriation of these machines and the forms of programming which are their own. Their modification and their diver- sion are an intrinsic part of the work of Martine Feipel & Jean Bechameil, who explore their limits. This automation system, which increasingly go- verns our daily life and is at the heart of our modern world, is never- theless not very accessible to the public. It is in this that the mastery of the technique and its stakes represents for artists an act revolutionary and symbolizes a takeover of power over a technology that governs us.
The utopias that marked the 20th century are laden with symbols glorifying industry while keeping a critical eye on the place that was made to man. Marxist representations of a voluntary and technical proletariat could well be put back on the agenda in our automation society. The remains that we are offered as historical and that we would like to see relegated as ancient symbols of a bygone past are all the more inspiring because they carry the dreams of a society turned towards emancipation. collective. These same vestiges are here re-contextualized in a choreography where the movement gives to see these symbols as fruits of the modern technology.
«Automatic revolution» captures the symbols of our modernity to confront them in this new era of automation. It is from a score and a programming system that the lights, sounds and works are set in mo- tion in an automated ballet. The timelessness that emerges from auto- mation takes up the idea of a modernity as a perpetual movement in which artists try to introduce a certain element of chance. They pro- pose us a staging where the silence gives way to the poetry of the real.
Artists Biography
Martine Feipel was born in 1975 in Luxembourg. Jean Bechameil was born in 1964 in Paris. The couple of artists have been working together since 2008 and currently live in Brussels. Martine Feipel studied art at the University of Arts Berlin and Central St Martins College of Arts & Design in London. Jean Bechameil went to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. He also worked on various film scenographies and helped to filmmaking of several films by Lars van Trier. The work of Martine Feipel & Jean Bechameil deals with questions of space. Selected in 2011 to represent Luxembourg at the 54th Venice Biennale, their work attempts, in a destructive way, to show the complexity of ideas hidden in the traditional way of building space and at the same time, it seeks to open a perception for an alterna- tive reflection. In their work, art and society go hand in hand. For the past ten years, they have been invited to numerous exhibitions such as Kunstmuseum Bonn, the Arsenal Pavilion in Paris or the Beau- fort Triennale in Belgium. In 2017, the Casino Forum of Contempora- ry Art Luxembourg dedicated a monographic exhibition to them. The COAL special prize of the 2018 Jury was awarded to them for their project «City of Emergency - Apus Apus». They are invited to create a permanent work in the public space for the trip to Nantes in 2019.
This exhibition will be part of the 9th edition of La Semaine du Son which will take place from Saturday, January 26 to Sunday, February 3, 2019.
The artists and the gallery thank THINKNTALK and FOCUNA for their support.
