RELIEF(S): HOW FRAC CENTRE QUESTIONS AND EXTENDS ITS IDENTITY

This project has a twofold intent: to both extend and rekindle the Frac Centre’s “Art and Architecture” identity, around a general theme, while at the same time questioning the institution’s actual identity, along with its dissemination methods, by way of a certain renewal of the forms and formats of programmes at Les Turbulences.

 

As a sign and as a mythical object, the mountain is a geographical category of the common sense which summons up a collective and universal imagination. For architecture, this “ultimate form of relief” represents a pure otherness, a form of resistance that is in a state of tension with its original programme of analysis and organization of the world.

 

So over and above the productivist relation to the territory introduced by modernity, the mountain is still that insurmountable and unfathomable domain with which artists and architects involve us. From representation to cartography and simulation, they remain the special “go-betweens” of the mountainous landscape.

 

The programme will explore different presences of the relief in art in the past sixty years, flushing out the aesthetic and political meanings which they convey. The representation of “elementary” natural forms is thus involved for the radical architecture of the 1960s as the medium of a criticism of the models issuing from industrial society.

 

A group show titled “Reliefs – Designing the Horizon“ will create a dialogue between the Frac Centre’s collection and contemporary creation, emerging and recognized alike. The visual circuit, devised in collaboration with the artist Aurélie Pétrel, will help to conjugate the presences of the works and their renewal with the definition of interplays of “viewpoints”. In this way, the exhibition will revisit the idea of hanging, tending towards the idea of the “grip” or “hold”, that elementary form on which the mountaineer projects himself and moves, but also where light reveals and creates the conditions of the way we look at things.

 

For the first time in France, the Japanese artist Yasuaki Onishi will present his installation reverse of volume FC, thus winding up a production residency. Somewhere between fragility and massiveness, this reverse relief will offer visitors an experience of sensory immersion and stimulation.

 

In the same time, the Frac will be devoting one of its first major solo shows to Gérard Singer. This great lover of mountaineering incarnates, all on his own, the material innovation and the first digital experiments situated on the borderline of art and architecture, in view of an urban updating of the mountain’s natural “complexity”.