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Think Park

Julien Prévieux

From Saturday 18 October to Sunday 1 February 2009


Keeping to its policy of monographic exhibitions, the Synagogue de Delme is inviting Julien Prévieux to take possession of the entire art centre. For over ten years this artist has been thwarting the corporate scene, the culture industries, cutting-edge technology, the laws of property, wide-spread surveillance and all other kinds of authoritarian activity.

Think Park takes visitors into an exhibit approached as a think tank. The artist invites us to consider a strange architectural assortment: a garage, a few huts and a boat turned into a house coexist for a hypothetical meeting that is up to us to imagine... especially upon finding out that these modest dwellings are in fact reproductions of the private spaces where famous philosophers, writers or inventors withdrew to work. For Julien Prévieux's work is primarily about thinking taking place beyond the reach of the spotlights, beginning its life unobtrusively, sometimes in solitude, and in any case at a remove from the main house: at the bottom of the garden or on top of a remote hill. Invisibly, in other words. Think Park creates a discussion group in the form of a neighbourhood, where Gustav Mahler, Wittgenstein, Alexander Graham Bell and Virginia Woolf can live together. One thing for sure: this "think park"€ has only the vaguest connections with those official think tanks where acclaimed experts, seasoned analysts and specialists from every field secretly dictate public policies.

Julien Prévieux's interest in the organisation and accumulation of knowledge - often to saturation point - is at the core of the second installation produced for this exhibition. The work takes the form of a library of obsolete and outdated ideas and is a result of a painstaking gathering of books whose content is not worth preserving. Following a long process of salvage in public and private libraries, the artist has set about saving a number of books from the scrap-heap, among them Le Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustré, a 1959 dictionary; La technique moderne of 1933; USSR: The Land Where the Sun Never Sets by Emil Schulthess (1971); L'imposture informatique by François de Closets and Bruno Lussato (2000); Top Tennis by Yvan Lendl (1987); Windows 95 For Dummies by Barrie Soskinsky and Christopher J. Benz (1999). Forgotten, spurned, consigned to the periphery of the cutting-edge, these books still make sense once reorganised in this library of linguistic, technical and historical rebuses. 

What is given shape by the library and the huts are the places apart referred to by Michel Foucault as heterotopies, "different spaces" that suddenly give utopia a tangible reality.

Julien Prévieux was born in 1974 in Grenoble, France. He lives and works in Paris. He graduated from the art school in Grenoble and holds post-graduate degrees from Paris and Marseille.

 

Solo exhibitions

Comment - No Comment, Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Centre d’art Contemporain, Bignan, 2008

Management Cockpit, La Vitrine, Paris, 2007

Pseudo-collision, LIA, Grenoble, 2007

Management of Change and Confl ict, galerie Jousse Entreprise, Paris, 2007

 

Recent group exhibitions

I will send you a photograph of the sky for everyday, Galerie West, La Hague, Holland, 2008

Business is Business, Centre culturel de Liège, Belgium, 2008

Argument de la diagonale, Bétonsalon, Centre d’art et de recherche, Paris, France, 2008

Valeurs croisées, Les ateliers de Rennes, Biennale d’art contemporain, Rennes, France, 2008

Not Only Possible but also Necessary, Optimism in the Age of Global War, 10th International Istanbul Biennal, Istanbul, Turkey, 2007

Utopomorphies, galerie António Henriques, Viseu, Portugal, 2007

World Factory, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, United-States, 2007

 

Bibliography

Lettres de Non-Motivation (pub. Zones – La Découverte)

Commotion, personal catalogue (pub. Jousse Entreprise