This fourth and final session will be the opportunity for an exchange with Béatrice Balcou, focusing on her recent works and the release of the major monograph dedicated to her by MER. Paper Kunsthalle*.
At his conference “Blackness and non-performance” at the Moma in 2015, the poet and theoretician Fred Moten formulated the concept of “non-performance”. The latter is not so much a refusal to perform, but rather a qualified refusal — highly strategic and political — to perform in accordance with the normative rationalities that condition and impose their own logics as the only ones possible and permitted.
In an attempt to apprehend Béatrice Balcou’s work through the prism of this idea, we will move between the unique glass sculptures that contain vestiges of works of art or insects, “devourers of legacies”, a forthcoming book that tears down the very idea of the monograph to better reinvent it, ceremonies held without an audience, and other “non-performances” that are in development. We will see how, working against and through a series of constraints (economic, physical, social, material, symbolic, etc.) the artist multiplies the variations on the theme of refusal, simultaneously proposing alternatives that establish their own rules. Finally, we will examine her artistic strategies that consist of stalling, opacity, anonymity, unproductivity, working at a reduced scale, and with a certain vulnerability, all of which she assumes responsibility for, to identify the way bodies—hers, the audiences, those of objects or other non-human beings—resist the injunctions of neo-liberal performance.
*The meeting will be followed by the official launch of the publication Ceremonies &. The work looks at all the Cérémonies (2013-2020) by connecting protocols drawn up by the artist, texts by various authors (Vanessa Desclaux, Christophe Gallois, Zoë Gray, Béatrice Gross, Julie Pellegrin, Émilie Renard, Septembre Tiberghien and Eva Wittocx), as well as exchanges with artists, collection directors, gallerists or publishers — providing a range of perspectives that allow us to follow the choreography woven by these unique performances, between work gestures and care gestures.
