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GANGEL, Tableau pour marquer l'est, 28 x 35,2 cm, lithographie sur papier cartonné, Metz, Moselle, France, 19e siècle, 4e quart. Collection du Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme, Paris.
Kévin Blinderman, An Erratic Jew, Oil on linen, 100 x 82 cm, 2023. View of the residence of Flora Citroën and Kévin Blinderman, CAC - la synagogue de Delme.
Kévin Blinderman, An Erratic Jew, Oil on linen, 100 x 82 cm, 2023. View of the residence of Flora Citroën and Kévin Blinderman, CAC - la synagogue de Delme.
Flora Citroën, Maman, Engraved wooden box, 40 x 30 x 13 cm, 2023. View of the residence of Flora Citroën and Kévin Blinderman, CAC - la synagogue de Delme.
Flora Citroën, Maman, Engraved wooden box, 40 x 30 x 13 cm, 2023. View of the residence of Flora Citroën and Kévin Blinderman, CAC - la synagogue de Delme.
Flora Citroën, Maman, Engraved wooden box, 40 x 30 x 13 cm, 2023. View of the residence of Flora Citroën and Kévin Blinderman, CAC - la synagogue de Delme.
Flora Citroën, Il y a un corps, performance, 6'08, 2023. View of the residence of Flora Citroën and Kévin Blinderman, CAC - la synagogue de Delme.
Flora Citroën, Il y a un corps, performance, 6'08, 2023. View of the residence of Flora Citroën and Kévin Blinderman, CAC - la synagogue de Delme.
Flora Citroën, Il y a un corps, performance, 6'08, 2023. View of the residence of Flora Citroën and Kévin Blinderman, CAC - la synagogue de Delme.
VERS L'EST
FLORA CITROËN ET KÉVIN BLINDERMAN
From Friday 1 December to Sunday 14 January 2024
Vers l'Est is the restitution of the residency of the artists Flora Citroën and Kévin Blinderman. Following their residency in Lindre-Basse from September to November 2023, the artists are offering an exhibition in the showcase of the Gue(ho)st House until January 14th 2024. Free entry.
With a shared sensibility towards the world and in their lives as artists, Flora Citroën and Kévin Blinderman chose to associate their practice during their residency in Lindre-Basse.
On the borders between sculpture and live concert, an archive-fiction concept or performance and the staging of ordinary objects, Kévin Blinderman develops an aesthetic that at first glance appears empty and disembodied, in which bodies are free to occupy the position corresponding to their emotional perception of the work in progress. At the heart of these almost living exhibition devices, the viewer occupies a position of retreat, caught between participation and analytical withdrawal, affective anaesthesia and emotional rush.
Flora Citroën’s work takes writing as its starting point, to construct fictions and sometimes auto-fictions, creative media mainly enabling her to give shape to her interest in calm or conflictual conversations, discussions, and oral exchanges – which she usually has with people, whether close friends or strangers. Her work takes the form of texts or exposés on paper, videos and so on, lending her creations an immaterial or even intangible presence, thus liberating themselves from the tyranny of objects.
The artists have in common the creation of artworks that give free rein to the expression of emotion, melancholy, and failure as an emancipatory value, running counter to a society that values – in a headlong rush – success, sure-fire happiness, and superficiality. They allow room for what is awkward and uncomfortable, not out of gratuitous provocation, but because these spaces of friction exist, are experienced by all on a daily basis, and therefore require artistic representation. The art of conversation, historical research, fiction writing (while playing on reality) sustains their practice and is based on a current tendency to construct fictive situations as an integral part of reality and vice versa.
In residence in Moselle, the artists wished to invest their Jewish origins to focus on the historical potential of the Synagogue de Delme and its community, now dispersed. Through an incomplete, mostly oral, and partially written story, the artists became improvised historians in order to express a story making the link between this Jewish history in Delme and their own. By making the synagogue a fictional character – the artists’ alter-ego, sharing a Jewish past and a present shaped by contemporary creation – they intend to draw on the many lacuna inherent to the history of the synagogue not as a constraint, but as so many interstices that they can enter into, to imagine connections and stories, inspired by reality to produce new fictions that might enlighten an as yet fragile history. Between personal quest and historical interest in a heritage site with a singular fate, Flora Citroën and Kévin Blinderman experiment together with new relationships with conversation, intimacy, and the aesthetic treatment of an emotional charge.
The artist residency programme is organised by the CAC - la synagogue de Delme in collaboration with the Lorraine Regional Natural Park and the village of Lindre-Basse.
After completing a bachelor's degree at ENSAPC, Kévin Blinderman began a master's degree at the Bezalel Art Academy before graduating from the Paris-Cergy art school in 2018. From 2020 to 2021, he will take part in the Berlin Program for Artists. In 2021, Kévin also presented his first solo exhibition at Confort Moderne, You're the Worst, following a six-month residency at the Poitiers art centre. In the same year, he was awarded a production grant from Mécènes du Sud to create and present his second solo show, The Solitary Hours of Night, at the Friche Belle de Mai in Marseille in summer 2022. He has exhibited at the Frac Ile-de-France, the Kunsthalle Bern, the KW Institute and the Berghain with the Boros collection. In his practice, Kévin Blinderman orchestrates physical and mental experiences in which the objects, situations and characters that surround him transcend their original functionality. His works and exhibitions are composed like scores, offering visitors a performative experience. His practice offers a melancholic and innovative density to alternative cultures and those who embody them. He is interested in what is expressed through them, in their concrete rationality and their own poetry.
Flora Citroën graduated from the University of the Arts London in 2013 (LCC, BA in Cinema), before joining ENSAPC where she obtained her Master's degree in 2018. She then joined the RADIAN PhD in practice program (2023-2026). Her work has been presented in France (Grands Voisins -Nuit Blanche, Fondation Fiminco, Théâtre Municipal de Montreuil, 65ème salon de Montrouge, Galerie Bertrand Grimont, Ygrec art center, Festival de Clermont Ferrand -web...) and abroad (Naples, Mexico City, New York). Her texts are regularly published or reinjected into her videos, installations and performances. In recent years, she has turned her attention to writing a novel: "Exposition", which she is publishing in serial form. The same goes for her diary, which she publishes fragmentarily in different editorial and artistic contexts. At the intersection of art and literature, she uses the exhibition as a publication medium. She conceives of her Life as socio-emotional material, from which she produces critical and tender narratives: for her, fiction repairs reality. Her work deals with the subjects of value, creation, wandering and love. She regularly searches for the limits of her own - both formal and conceptual - practice and then breaks with it. In this way, she performs an experimental metafiction aimed at the idea that there is always an elsewhere.
