Void if Removed is the fourth and final instalment in the “Erudition Concrète” series of exhibitions by Guillaume Désanges, guest curator at the Plateau since 2009.

Continuing the theme of previous exhibitions exploring the renewed relationship between art and knowledge, this instalment begins with the idea of experiences that are simultaneously conceivable and impossible and presents us with situations where observation itself destroys the possibility of observing. More precisely, artworks – sculptures, photographs, videos or performances – that are all the more frustrating and fragile because the phenomena they contain or suggest threaten to evaporate upon being opened. This containment arouses curiosity, encourages secrets to be violated, but maintains knowledge as peaceful speculation, remote, like a mirage suggesting the “representation of the possible” (Marcel Duchamp) and evoking a fantastic dizziness.

This type of mechanism “Void if removed” concerns just as many scientific and poetic situations as much as philosophical and political ones. But the experiencing of an impossible experience is not only a metaphysical headache; it can also involve very concrete, physical and sensual situations. Art, in its unrivalled capacity to formalise ideas outside of any determined system is perhaps the privileged space for these “inexperiencable” experiences, these expressions of the unutterable, these impossibilities of the possible.

This final exhibition closes the series on knowledge through two diverging perspectives without being contradictory : the irreducible inaccessibility of knowledge as well as its infinite possibilities.

Featured artists : Bas Jan Ader, Eric Baudelaire, Bernard Bazile, Alighiero Boetti, Chris Burden, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Marcel Duchamp, Ceal Floyer, Ryan Gander, Dora García, Joseph Grigely, Ann Veronica Janssens, Jirí Kovanda, João Louro, Julien Loustau, Daniel Pommereulle, Stephen Prina, Anna Maria Maiolino, Man Ray, Lawrence Weiner, Ian Wilson, Carey Young, Rémy Zaugg.

Venue
Le Plateau
Corner of rue des allouettes and rue carducci
75019 Paris
M° Jourdain ou Buttes-Chaumont

Dates
9 June - 7 August  
www.fracidf-leplateau.com

Read the 'interview of Guillaume Desanges, Curator of this exhibition, on our blog.

Photo credit – GD/Work Method