In Between

February 9 - May 13, 2018
  • Sebastian Stumpf 

  • LE BAL / Matthieu Samadet 

  • Hiwa K, still from View From Above, 2017

    Hiwa K / KOW, Berlin and Prometeo Gallery di Ida Pisani, Milan/Lucques

  • LE BAL / Matthieu Samadet 

  • Rabih Mroué, The Leap Year’s diary, 2006-2016

    Rabih Mroué / Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hambourg / Beirut

  • LE BAL / Matthieu Samadet 

  • Darek Fortas, Changing Room VI, 2012

    Darek Fortas

  • LE BAL / Matthieu Samadet 

  • Debi Cornwall, Welcome to Camp America : Inside Guantánamo Bay, Beyond Gitmo, 2017

    Debi Cornwall / Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

  • Henk Wildschut, Ville de Calais, Partie Sud, 2016

    Henk Wildschut

  • Go get lost, 2018

    Mélanie Pavy

From February 9  to May 13, LE BAL presents In Between, a collective show with Bas Jan Ader, Debi Cornwall, Stéphane Degoutin & Gwenola Wagon, Luc Delahaye, Darek Fortas, Hiwa K, Aglaia Konrad, Jacques-Henri Michot, Rabih Mroué, Mélanie Pavy, Sebastian Stumpf, Henk Wildschut and Paola Yacoub.

"…what is lost is the in-between which should have formed between this individual and his fellow men." Hannah Arendt

This exhibition is a poetic, abstract, fragile attempt to translate something of our times. Something indefinable, intangible but that might be recognised as the condition of one person, of several or of all: being in a state of suspension.

Neither a transition towards a possible future, nor an intermediate step, this condition relates to an inability to move forward and endless repetition of the same patterns. No longer knowing where to go, feeling out of place, having an indeterminate, blurry, precarious status and repeating gestures that have no meaning or purpose are its outward manifestations.

The state of suspension is often likened to being paralysed or stunned, but it is actually a constant, relentless, never-ending struggle to adapt. The threat comes into focus. Time seems to be running out. It is a struggle not to break free from temporality but to enter it.

Elusive and protean, the state of suspension is also something that defies depiction. How can its substance and reality be expressed? How can a person living in this state be represented, disappearing under the immediate proliferation and obsolescence of images, discourses, laws and technologies indifferent to his fate?

For the artists, the state of suspension is not a “subject”. It operates there, someplace, almost in spite of them. Their images are striking for their brutal, concrete, immediate intensity, but also touching for their simplicity, a form of neutrality, terseness and distance, as though they had to impoverish language in order to get as close to meaning as possible.

They depict people in a state of suspension, relegated to outside history, outside the landscape, surviving in a political no-man’s-land: frozen, isolated, trapped or floating bodies in empty places. Space closes in on itself. Faces and exchanged glances have vanished.

The exhibition is a heterogeneous constellation of places and issues, gradually weaving a wide network of echoes, suggesting a common place of suspension. When the myth of history moving forward in a straight line ends, when the idea of a shared destiny fades, suspension spreads out on another scale. It gradually may come to describe a state of the world. 

- Diane Dufour

 

To go along with the exhibition, LE BAL and Shelter Press have co-published In Between.

In the Press

« In Between walks in step with our time: our love-hate relationships with states of in-betweenness, with not knowing who we are, where we are going, and where our culture is headed. »

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Tuesday 6 March, Tuesday 27 March and Tuesday 10 April 2018 - 8 pm

Refuge Fukushima

Conversation with Mélanie Pavy and Sophie Houdart

Thursday 15 february, 2018 - 8PM

The Size of Our Souls

Trio performed by Julie Nioche, Gwenaëlle Aubry and Sir Alice

Thursday 15 March, 2018 - 8PM

The suspended time of authoritarian rule. A tribute to Osman Kavala

Carte blanche to Béatrice Hibou

Thursday 29 March 2018 - 7 pm

Bordering on the human. For a comparative anthropology of artificial creatures

With anthropologist and filmmaker Emmanuel Grimaud

Thursday 8 March, 2018 - 8PM

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