“Avant L’orage” @Bourse de Commerce, Paris

Where: Bourse de Commerce, Paris
When: Feb 2 - Sept 18, 2023
Curators: Emma Lavigne, Nicolas-Xavier Ferrand

Avant l'orage (Before the storm) - Poetic cries about the climate crisis
by Hilary Tsui

“Against the backdrop of the climate crisis, in the urgency of the present, before the storm breaks again, the artists in the exhibition invent unusual ecosystems that contain new seasons.” (Press release)

Works by 20 artists transformed the museum’s spaces into unstable ecosystems against the backdrop of climate change. A few highlights:

Tropeaolum by Danh Vo

Danh Vo is known for his conceptual works that play with materials and multi-layered ideas that deal with issues of self-identity, cultural heritage and geopolitical discourse. This time, a visually complex installation meticulously put together, sits right in the middle of the rotunda, upon the backdrop of the grand Bourse de Commerce.

The wooden structures that form support of the dead tree trunks collected locally, are from sustainable forests owned by Craig  McNamara, who is the son of Robert McNamara, former US Secretary of Defense and architect of the Vietnam War, indirectly responsible for the exile of the artist’s family to Denmark.

Other works by Vo from the Pinault collection – photos of colorful flowers from Vo’s garden, with handwritten captions of their scientific names - are being arranged and mounted as if to provide gleams of life and rays of hope amidst their dark and doomed surrounding. Adding onto these, wooden historical sculptures from churches popped up mysteriously at different corners - an element that Vo has been working with for years which has a subtle linkage to his catholic family background.

This is another piece that he combines his personal history and narratives with a broader social and historical discourses, as he put nature, regeneration and hope to the center stage.
(The installation was curated by Caroline Bourgeois)

CY Twombly with Daniel Steegmann Mangrane

“Coronation of Sesostris” (2000) by Twombly composed of 10 panels, was one of the major painting cycles of the artist. Inspired by the story of Egyptian pharaoh Sesostris’ conquests to Asia Minor, fighting his way westward until he crossed into Europe. Twombly took the ancient story and reinterpreted it to give it a new light. The sixth panel incorporates parts of a poem about the departure of the gods by the American poet Patricia Waters, yet it was scribbled in thin red paint and is barely legible.

In the same room, the installation by Mangrane, Breathing Lines, interacts constantly with its surrounding. The minimalistic installation uses small branches and luminous filaments which respond to the fluctuation of sounds or movements in the room, reflecting on the profound inter-connection of all the things in our world.  

Elysia Chlorotica by Anicka Yi

Anicka Yi's lantern-like, stylistic light sculptures are in fact made of kelp - they are plant-based cocoons for animatronic insects. The artist has obviously blurred the line of natural and artificial worlds and seems to propose a peaceful co-existence of the two.

All in all, the exhibition grants us an imaginative escape and a little breather to experience different scenarios before mankind reaches the point of dystopic destructions. Poetic and conceptual as the exhibition was conceived, its message is loud and clear.

Tropeaolum. 2023. Danh Vo. Rotunda, Bourse de Commerce. Photo: CT Arts

CY Twombly. Coronation of Sesostris (2000). Daniel Steegmann Mangrane, “Breathing lines”. Photo: CT Arts

Anicka Yi, Elysia Chlorotica, 2019 - 2023