L'Année dernière à Malmaison

Authors’ Comment

L'Année dernière à Malmaison

An exhibition that escapes from the gallery and migrates to the hallways.
The side entrance of the S-E wing of the Malmaison building becomes a temporary entrance to the exhibition space under two nightshirts hanging from the ceiling. Embroidered shirts with the names of the artists and the name of the exhibition instead of posters. Among the shirts, a billboard and a bench, later a capsule with a fragment of the exhibition. The public hall becomes an introduction to a journey instead of a simple passage space.
The exhibition spans the hallway on the first floor and the main access staircase is used as an exploration tool – from the upward perspective of the staircase, Philip Topolovac’s aggregate is no longer just a static surprise in a white cube. The black object enters the dynamics of the space it occupies, appears from around the corner, hides or overlaps with the lamp, disappears after a pillar and this type of perception on the go makes the work “from there”.
At the end of the other staircase, in dialog with the three-dimensional black object, fill the wall of the floor with the photograph of Louise Clement. The Malmaison staircase leaves the area of spatial functionality and ends up being an instrument of an augmented exhibition path; after the corner, on the pillar of the hallway, two photographs from the series of Ambrei Viviani.
A mesh hanging from the lamp in the shaft of the ladder, Ambrei Viviani’s installation about memory: Photos mounted on a suspended reel with a hanger under the glass of the luminaire. On the long hallway of the second floor continues the series of works of the same author; in the niches of the first four windows are mounted ceramic bazoreliefs that enter the logic of the sacked rhythm of the space, points marked on the series of gaps. The last bazorelief coincides with the position of the entrance to the /SAC@Malmaison gallery.
In the center of the gallery, Philip Topolovac’s bunkers are suspended on a white plane, with Olivia Berckemeyer’s blue wax ship as a three-dimensional counterpoint. The rest of the works are centrifuged on the perimeter of the space according to these two landmarks that give mass to the exhibition system. A system in which the black threads of Haleh Redjaian’s work move away from the wall plane subtly occupying a volume suggested more by vibration than by materiality. A space that vibrates behind the ghost ship and filters the perspective to the rest of the works at the transition between the large hall of the gallery /SAC and the room dominated by the colorful caterpillar of Mircea Suciu: counterpoint and from the end for an exhibition that can be carried out perfectly and vice versa, in which the downward perspective on the ladder and the walk in the hallway change the meaning. Not only the sense of walking, but also that of the story of Malmaison from which you came between the cherry trees under the nightshirts.