Hello, I am an independent self-taught curator based in Paris. I conceive exhibitions as performative protocols that can be activated by myself or others, unfolding through contingent interactions rather than static display. My curatorial practice is drawn to artistic strategies that embrace destruction, material transformation, and participatory engagement, questioning the exhibition space and its possibilities.
For several years, I have been conducting an ongoing research on disasters and their iconographies, focusing on the ways catastrophes are aestheticized, archived, and re-enacted within artistic and curatorial discourses. This inquiry extends to the traces of lost, vanished, or missing artworks, culminating in the Oblivion Collection, a participatory online archive dedicated to gathering remnants and spectral evidence of disappeared art. By engaging with the visual and conceptual residues of destruction, my curatorial research interrogates what remains, what is forgotten, and how disappearance itself might become an artistic gesture.
StudioPoush
153 Avenue Jean Jaures 93300 AubervilliersRepresented bypal project
39 Rue de Grenelle
75007 Paris
BAD EMS
Location
Galerie Romero Paprocki 8 Rue Saint-Claude
75003 Paris
Dates
10 February 2024
20 March 2024
Photo credits
Galerie Romero Paprocki
Artist
Alexandre Bavard
Statement
Alexandre Bavard spent last year in residency at Schloss Balmoral in Bad Ems. This period of reflection enabled him to continue his study of the upheavals that have shaken French society for several years now, with recent social unrest demonstrating the flaws in our contemporary democracies. Alexandre Bavard travelled then to Athens to carry out a very personal investigation into the traces of democracy. In the course of his “investigation” - a term which, in ancient Greek, shares the same etymology as the word “History” - the artist realised that the questions that run through our societies today have always been present in European civilisations.
Bad ems can thus be read as a sequel to the BRAV project carried out in 2023 at the Tick Tack gallery (Antwerp), in which Alexandre Bavard pitted supposed chivalric honour against the hypothetical republican spirit of the police. Bad ems takes as its starting point the myth of Antigone, the Greek heroine who defies the law to try and give her brother a decent burial. This striking injustice inspired him to think about updating the myth through theatre, in line with his previous works. This exhibition is like a set waiting to be activated by actors.
Drawing on numerous references from the ancient world and urban cultures, Alexandre Bavard questions the writing of history, the making of myths and the construction of contemporary heroic figures. He draws on the imaginary world of ancient masks to remix it with a kaleidoscope of references, figures and memories. In producing this procession of portraits, like so many immemorial heroes ready to inhabit a stage, the artist deploys a multitude of expressive faces on the gallery walls. It is undoubtedly an opportunity to recall the good words of Friedrich Nietzsche, for whom: ‘Wisdom is what the solitary man whispers to himself in the public square’. These masks can in turn be used to adorn the two headless flayers roaming the exhibition. They are the archetypal men and women who have been crushed by an oppressive system. Freed from their skin, the membrane that separates their spirit from the world, these chimeras become all the closer to ourselves.
Drawing on numerous references from the ancient world and urban cultures, Alexandre Bavard questions the writing of history, the making of myths and the construction of contemporary heroic figures. He draws on the imaginary world of ancient masks to remix it with a kaleidoscope of references, figures and memories. In producing this procession of portraits, like so many immemorial heroes ready to inhabit a stage, the artist deploys a multitude of expressive faces on the gallery walls. It is undoubtedly an opportunity to recall the good words of Friedrich Nietzsche, for whom: ‘Wisdom is what the solitary man whispers to himself in the public square’. These masks can in turn be used to adorn the two headless flayers roaming the exhibition. They are the archetypal men and women who have been crushed by an oppressive system. Freed from their skin, the membrane that separates their spirit from the world, these chimeras become all the closer to ourselves.
To understand Alexandre Bavard's research, we need to look at his unique production system, a system that can be summed up by the formula: ‘gleaning, collage, moulding, copying’. A process that can be repeated ad infinitum to produce a finished work. In the course of his reading, travels and peregrinations, the artist has built up a large corpus of documents, including iconographic collections, historical references and cheap antique reproductions. His preparatory research begins with a careful selection of certain images, which he assembles instinctively. Some of these are then chosen to be produced in three dimensions, in an amalgam of salvaged forms. If the volumes are judged to be satisfactory, they are mass-produced in several materials so that they can be recomposed, reassembled and reworked once again. Moulds that produce copies facilitate the loss of information between the original and the final result, yet Alexandre Bavard never ceases to add new references drawn from multiple time-spaces so that he can juxtapose them and rework them again and again, creating a personal cosmogony.