18:30 – 20:00
WITH MANUEL FADAT
Art is/and life
Navigating between several temporalities, zeitgeists, countries, artists, media, materials, forms and techniques, the collective and thematic exhibition La Vie simple – Simplement la vie / Songs of Alienation – which strikes a fine balance between autonomy and heteronomy in the works on display – constitutes not only a reflection on art history but also an artistic, poetic and political (pro)position.
Liberating the forces of the works of “apparent” simplicity which it articulates, the exhibition offers us a look that is in fact complex. It invites us, among other things, to reflect, whoever we may be, on our relationship to existence, to the world, to life, and to the lives we have lived and dreamed. This “life”, and ultimately this “what to experience and how?”, always tied to a “what to represent and how?” – these are questions to which artists have never ceased to address themselves at all levels, for themselves and for others. Particularly since the artistic ruptures of the late 19th century.
The major issues raised by La Vie simple are the starting point for these two talks, the first in the lecture room and the second in the galleries. As well as saying a few words on the ability of an exhibition and artworks to create the conditions enabling thought and analysis, and the dynamic role therein played by physical and conceptual qualities, we shall modestly seek to explore the relationships between art and life, from which derive a number of themes still topical in contemporary art: its critical, social and political dimensions.
Manuel Fadat is an art historian, art critic and independent exhibition curator and also works with the Oudeis team, which he joined in 2012. He is greatly interested in the question of social and political dimensions in contemporary art.
He is a specialist in particular in the mutations in glass arts and the uses of glass in art. He teaches and writes and for the past few years has also run major projects with Ecolint, the International School of Geneva.