by Liza Maignan & Fiona Vilmer “Sleep No More” is one of the titles that was rejected for the science-fiction film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956). An extra-terrestrial phenomenon identically replicates the bodies of the inhabitants while [...]
A symphony of greed resonates in the exchange floors,where fortunes are played and settled with scores. The devil’s suit is tailor-made, a handmade design,his fork replaced by interwoven contracts.In boardrooms and behind the scenes, where secrets unveil,he negotiates deals in [...]
by Elsa Vettier It’s not always pleasant to hear the word, or even worse, to be called cute— this word that has now seemingly replaced its equivalent mignon in the French language. When used to describe an artwork, the term [...]
by Clara Guislain “It’s always been very important to me that my work has a socialized veneer. I’ve never wanted my work to be associated with the Dada sensibility – to be perceived as simply negational. I want the initial [...]
by Marie Bechetoille A conversation between Bernie Poikāne and Marie Bechetoille April 2023 Marie Bechetoille: What is your relationship to the notion of cuteness in your film practice? Bernie Poikāne: My films are almost always born from a feeling of [...]
by Julie Portier It’s a shame that the rhythm of publication of La belle revue, in its paper version, does not allow us to pick up a text from where we left off in the previous issue, in the manner [...]
Lou Ferrand: The situationist concept of “psychogeography”,1 connecting the city to something akin to emotions or desire, and more specifically the book La Nuit by Michèle Bernstein came to mind when I was preparing this conversation. In this book, two [...]
by Marie Bechetoille Artist Fallon Mayanja composes and assembles poetic texts and sound works linked to other bodies and other voices, which are deployed during performances and within installations. The idea is first to listen – but to really listen, [...]
by Sophie Lapalu Sophie Lapalu: You are a musician, performer, dancer, composer, photographer, choir conductor, researcher, DJ, activist, and researcher at the Research Cooperative at the École supérieure d’art de Clermont-Ferrand. How do you introduce yourself? Gérald Kurdian: I think [...]
by Marie Bechetoille Marie Bechetoille: Zombies now play a major role in Western fictions, particularly in film and television series, but also in the visual arts. Artists use them to represent desires for vengeance and violence, but also possibilities of [...]
by Julie Portier Let’s provide some context: when the committee of La belle revue got together last summer, after the confinement that we’d already agreed to call – in a curious mixture of derision and lucidity – ‘the first confinement’, [...]
by Julie Portier I immediately thought of Laurent Le Deunff to discuss the figure of the zombie in film. I know that he is a fan and I have often seen him refer to zombie films to talk about sculpture [...]
by Sophie Lapalu Joseph Tonda is a sociologist and anthropologist; he teaches at Omar Bongo University in Libreville and regularly lectures at the EHESS in Paris. While his research is about Central Africa, he is also interested in works undertaken [...]
by Benoît Lamy de la Chapelle ‘The idea of a world where human life might be artificially prolonged has a nightmare quality.’1 During the most recent Lyon Biennale (2019), a member of the editorial committee mentioned her exasperation with the [...]
by Pietro Della Giustina Pietro Della Giustina: In the mythological and religious tradition of Haitian Voodoo, the spirit of a deceased person can be summoned from the realm of the dead by a necromancer, through black magic, in order to [...]
par Julie Portier Let’s take two social subjects that chronically stoke the passions of public opinion, while public authorities are tending to show growing disinterest in them; two subjects that reliably cause tensions and defiance both outside of their spheres [...]
by Thom Donovan Love to the student who said “illness is a poem” And love to the student who is sick without a doctor’s noteAnd love to the student who noticed my hat matched my coffee cupAnd love to the [...]
by Marie Bechetoille Marie Bechetoille: Clovis Maillet, you’ve been working as an artist in a duo with Louise Hervé for around fifteen years and you’ve shown your work at many institutions in France and abroad, represented by the Galerie Marcelle [...]
by Benoît Lamy de la Chapelle In recent highlights and appraisals on art schools in France and Europe after the Bologna Accords, and in debates regarding whether or not art schools under these conditions are still reliable as places to [...]
by Sophie Lapalu Sophie Lapalu: Alessandra Pomarico, you present yourself as a curator of “residency programmes for international and multidisciplinary artists in Italy and Europe, at the point of intersection between the arts, pedagogy, social issues, and the poetics of [...]
by Pietro Della Giustina Natalia Arcos is a Chilean, Mexican-based researcher and curator. She holds a degree in Theory and Art History from the University of Chile and a Master in Contemporary Art from Paris IV-Sorbonne University. In addition to [...]
by Julie Portier To broach an embarrassing subject, we started by pondering some deliberately tiresome questions: “What is political art?” or “can art (still) be left wing?” If the title of the fifth thematic dossier of La belle revue has wound up sounding [...]
by Marie Bochetoille Po B. K. Lomami is a programmer, coordinator of socioartistic projects, performer, writer, musician, zine creator, and activist of Congolese descent (RDC) based in Belgium. Her anticolonialist, afrofeminist, and anticapitalist engagement combines militant actions and artistic forms, [...]
by Vanina Géré Several years ago, I was advocating without hesitation for the idea of a “political” art: an art whose content I deemed progressive (feminist, antiracist, etc.) created by artists whose approach I considered honest in terms of its [...]
by Sophie Lapalu Sophie Lapalu: In 2010–2011, you took the Masters in Arts and Politics (SPEAP), then joined the School of Public Affairs at Sciences Po. The presentation of the programme is as follows: “This course invites students to confront [...]
par Benoît Lamy de la Chapelle The actual work of the contemporary artist is his or her CV1. De tonalité grise et sobre, constitués d’un mobilier froid et métallique, compressant les employés s’y affairant, les espaces de bureau dépeints dans [...]
by Marie Bechetoille Precarious statuses, contracts, pay, abuses of power, self-exploitation, and hypocrisy… The work of Joshua Schwebel identifies and reveals recurring, problematic practices in the contemporary art world, despite the fact that they are often invisible, masked, or hushed [...]
by Sophie Lapalu For the last few years, sociologist Barthelemy Bette has been preparing a thesis entitled L’art contemporain au travail, enquête sur des pratiques artistiques à la frontières de deux mondes sociaux [From Contemporary Art to Labour: An Inquiry [...]
by Julie Portier The most sensible of economists say so, and have done since the late 19th century: capitalist societies are evolving towards a growing reduction in work and reduction in the time that will be devoted to it in [...]
by Benoît Lamy de la Chapelle The ideal of an artists’ community revives some old fantasies: autonomy and independence in the face of social rules or professional norms and a desire to do things differently and in different places. Very [...]
by Mathieu Loctin Escena Politica is an anonymous collective comprising Argentinian artists working in the fields of contemporary dance and theatre who aim to reveal the profound malfunctions of the Argentine state and particularly the city of Buenos Aires in [...]
by Matha Rosler Original version published in english by e-flux. [...]
by Benoît Lamy de la Chapelle La Pommerie is an art research venue located on the Plateau de Millevaches and has a special role as an outlet of contemporary culture in a very remote social and geographic context. Very different [...]
by Marie Bechetoille Pauline Curnier Jardin is a storyteller, her projects most often take the form of installations, combining video, sculpture, performance, and painting. Like Ulysses’ use of metis [cunning], Pauline Curnier Jardin slips into other people’s skins in order [...]
by Annabela Tournon Identified through various movements restoring the humanist notion of painting (whose death certificate had nonetheless been duly signed by the picture artists group and its critics1), the history of the 1980s reiterated the story of the return [...]
by Franck Balland While the grotesque contributes, as Véronique Klauber notes in her definition, “the confirmation of the instability of everything”1, then the forces that animate the work of Jonas Delaborde frequently bring him back towards this register in which [...]
by Jill Gapsarina “I love my web And that’s a fact Guess while this loads I’ll grab a snack”1 The grotesque is a perfect object of study for our age. You can delve into a complete online reading of the [...]
by Benoît Lamy de la Chapelle In the field of contemporary art, open to the world and concerned with the future of people, living creatures, and the environment, initiatives and projects pertaining to politics, social welfare, economics, or ecology are [...]
In May 1970, at a time when the first warm rays of the Californian spring were beginning to be felt, Swiss artist Dieter Roth organised an exhibition at the Eugenia Butler gallery (Los Angeles) that was remarkable, to say the [...]
We remember Martin Kippenberger (Dortmund, 1953 – Vienne, 1997) for his humour and irreverence. His motto was “Jeder Künstler ist ein Mensch”1, subverting Joseph Beuys’ famous maxim “Jeder Mensch ist ein Künstler”2. By switching the words, the citation is used [...]
H – Do you know it by heart, Blanqui’s phrase used as copy-and-paste in all the press releases from our association? H – I’d say it’s something like: Same monotony, same immobility (…). The universe repeats itself endlessly and paws [...]
Roland Barthes was one of the first to consider our everyday life attentively. With his Mythologies in particular, he revealed the way in which consumer objects and social practices shared en masse produce a discourse that speaks volumes about the twitches and [...]
The deformed shadow of Pinocchio, the mirroring mises-en-abyme of Blade Runner and the Arnolfini Wedding,1 the grimacing face of Aphex Twin by Chris Cunningham, the hyperbolic chignon of Madeleine… all of these figures were present in the exhibition Enchanter la matière vulgaire and have recurred several [...]
We are at the very beginning, you see.As though before everything.The night is hot and humid, wild, perhaps.You advance, masked. A mask in the image of your face, Cruise face to face, seeing Kidman escaping, ready for anything in order [...]
Concerning philosophers of French Theory, the newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné once stated that it was “the equivalent of Post-its in stationary: apparently they’re stuck onto everything” (8 October 1997). This was an accurate statement that was far from ill-founded. From [...]
La belle revue has chosen to inaugurate its new thematic section with an old subject. It does not intend to say everything about citations (that would be repetitious) but instead to glance into a few corners (in the studio and [...]
