Descripción de la Exposición
Mendes Wood DM is proud to inaugurate its new gallery space in Paris with the exhibition entitled I See No Difference Between a Handshake and a Poem curated by Fernanda Brenner. Taking its title from a sentence in a letter by the poet Paul Celan in 1960, the exhibition brings together a wide range of artists from different contexts and career stages while considering its distinctive location: the oldest planned square in Paris, the Place des Vosges. The collective show proposes a divagation on touching hands across time: the hand imprinted on the rock walls of a cave, the hand holding another hand, the hand that caresses, creates, and destroys. The works on view invite a close look at what hands touch and circumscribe and what it lets slip away as a reconsideration of how we relate to living and non-living beings, starting from the simple acknowledgment that all things exist through mutual engagement. It is, above all, a proposition to look at subjects not as isolated and autonomous entities but as a flickering constellation between inhuman time, nonhuman forces, and geologic materiality.
“The works brought there for display, or created specifically for that site, mark the transformation of a former residential home and long-closed psychoanalytic clinic into a new contemporary art gallery. Like anonymous handprints in a cave, they leave imprints on a different time, touching someone else’s memories and listening to lingering voices to form an elliptical and allusive environment. Forms interrupt and complement each other ceaselessly, as if many hands were superimposed with a strange coherence that is not that of narrative.” – excerpt from the curatorial text by Fernanda Brenner.
Artists include: Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa, Armando Andrade Tudela, Lucas Arruda, Karim Aïnouz, Adrián Balseca, Tosh Basco, Katinka Bock, Paloma Bosquê, Nina Canell, Guglielmo Castelli, Alejandro Cesarco, Mariana Castillo Deball, Marguerite Duras, Philipp Fleischmann, Sonia Gomes, Barbara Hammer, Runo Lagomarsino, Patricia Leite, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Paul Maheke, Hana Miletić, Charlotte Moth, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Paulo Nazareth, Lygia Pape, Yvonne Rainer, Letícia Ramos, Mauro Restiffe, Luiz Roque, Giangiacomo Rossetti, Maaike Schoorel, Jeremy Shaw, Paula Siebra, Willard Steiner & Ralph Van Dyke, Davide Stucchi, Kishio Suga, Pol Taburet, Sophie Thun and Erika Verzutti.