Now firmly anchored in the calendar as an unexpected new contemporary art event, OFFSCREEN returns for a second edition from 18 to 22 October 2023, taking up residence in a monumental new space in the heart of Paris’s 8th district, a former garage with an emblematic Art Deco façade.
Following the success of its inaugural edition, which celebrated Anthony McCall at the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild and continuing its innovative model, halfway between an artistic curation and a highlight of the art market calendar, OFFSCREEN’s second edition will gather major works by avant-garde, historical or contemporary artists that revolve around the practices of the image.
OFFSCREEN brings together installations and experiments with still and moving images in a wide range of media, including video, film, photography, sculpture, mixed-media installations, digital works, and invites visitors to discover the diversity, cross-disciplinarity and richness of these approaches in contemporary international art.
These proposals – most of them monographic – will be presented during Paris art week by a selection of international and French galleries in an immersive walk-through of the eight floors of an extraordinary Brutalist building with large, frosted glass windows.
OFFSCREEN is organized under the artistic direction of Julien Frydman and was founded by Jean- Daniel Compain and Julien Frydman.
Special Guest – Rosa Barba
For its second edition, OFFSCREEN is dedicating an entire level of the Grand Garage Haussmann to the work Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage (2021) by Rosa Barba, which refers both to the film shot in the underwater waters of Cyprus at the site of the famous Mazotos shipwreck, and to the perennial outdoor film installation specially built to project it at the heart of the green line between Cyprus and the territories under Turkish control, recreated in the spaces of the Grand Garage Haussmann.
Rosa Barba is an Italian artist and filmmaker, living in Berlin. She explores cinema as both a medium and art object and creates installations and site-specific interventions to analyze the ways space is articulated and reflected by Time, placing the work and the viewer in a new relationship. Her films often focus on natural landscapes and man’s interventions in the environment. They probe the relationship between historical archives, personal anecdotes, and cinematic representation, creating spaces of memory and uncertainty, more legible as reassuring myths than the unstable reality they represent. Her work has been exhibited at prestigious institutions and biennials around the world including: Tate Modern, London (2023); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2023); Villa Medici, Rome (2022); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2021).
Among the artists presented:
Carmen Calvo
Carmen Calvo (1950, Valencia, Spain) is one of the most emblematic conceptual artists on the international art scene. In her works, which draw some of their inspiration from popular culture, she denounces the violence of society and reflects on the challenges of globalization. Her artistic language unfolds in the form of small fragments of various materials, notably ceramics and clay, and moves from small-scale pieces to large-scale installations in a quest for scenography. In 1997, Carmen Calvo represented Spain at the Venice Biennale. In 2003, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía organized a retrospective exhibition of her work in Madrid. In 2013, she was awarded the National Plastic Arts Prize. Numerous exhibitions of her work have been held in museums and galleries in Spain (Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia) and abroad (New York, Paris, Lausanne, Geneva, Mexico City, Buenos Aires). Carmen Calvo is presented by the Luis Adelantado Gallery (Spain).
Leyla Cardenas
Leyla Cardenas (1975, Bogotá, Colombia) is a major Colombian artist whose work was acclaimed at the Lyon Biennial in 2022. Her work, whether installations, sculptures or photographs, questions urban ruins and abandoned spaces to reveal social transformations and lost memories. Following a residency with archaeologists at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, Leyla Cardenas developed projects dealing with ruins and archaeology to materialize the time she considers through vertical stratification. In a process that deconstructs to reconstruct, she uses textiles to create works of great fragility, exploring reality in a sculptural gesture to give a third dimension to photography. Textile becomes the support for her photographs, which she strips away in whole or in part, leaving only the threads of time. OFFSCREEN will feature a dialogue between her textile productions and the video “Deep time”, filmed on the outskirts of Bogotá and conveying the idea of a cyclical present. Leyla Cardenas is presented by Galerie DIX9 Hélène Lacharmoise (France).
Thomas Devaux
Thomas Devaux (1980, Marcq-en-Barœul, France) is a visual photographer who has produced several complex series in which both the founding values and current developments in photography come into play. His photographic work, which is close to painting and drawing, enables him to pursue his research into the themes of the sacred, the profane and transcendence, which were already present in his early work. At OFFSCREEN he presents an installation specially created for the occasion. Thomas Devaux is represented by Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach (Belgium).
Orshi Drozdik
Orshi (Orsolya) Drozdik (1946, Abda, Hungary), a visual artist of Hungarian origin living in New York, is not only one of the leading figures of Hungarian conceptual art in the 1970s, but also a major representative of international feminist art. The human body is a regular motif in her work and can also often be its medium. Her work is built around the constitution and definition of the self, and the question of sexual identity. Her artistic language unfolds in an exploration of two poles, the feminine “I” and the creative “I”. The artist presents a body of work combining video, photography, performances, and photocopies from 1979 to 1981. Orshi Drozdik is presented by Einspach Gallery (Hungary).
Paul Graham
Paul Graham (1956, Stafford, UK) is a British photographer living and working in New York. In 1981, Graham achieved great success with A1: The Great North Road, a series of color photographs taken along the A1, Britain’s longest numbered road. His use of color film in the early 1980s, at a time when British photography was dominated by traditional black-and-white social documentary, was revolutionary. In 2011, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired the complete set of prints from The Great North Road, the original set Graham used to print his first book in 1983. Shown this year at OFFSCREEN, his Shimmer of Possibility series (previously exhibited in 2009 at MoMA in New York and at Rencontres d’Arles in 2018), reveals itself to be a powerful antidote to “the decisive moment”. Paul Graham is presented by Galerie Clémentine de la Ferronière (France).
Graciela Sacco
The work of Graciela Sacco (1956-2017, Rosario, Argentina) draws on the artistic expressions of the 1960s, establishing strong links between artistic experimentation and social commitment. Her works are linked to light and graphics. From the outset and throughout his career, his work has invited us to reflect on political and social violence: transits, exiles, migrations, the nuclei of conflict in the social fabric, present in episodes of different historical distances. The use of different photosensitive processes has enabled him to materialize ideas and concepts with a particularity that has marked his work with a clear and vital artistic identity. His first ‘Bocanada interference’ – as the artist used to describe his practice – took place in the Argentinian city of Rosario in 1993. OFFSCREEN presents a unique portfolio by Bocanada, as well as an installation from her series ‘Sombras del Sur y de Norte’ (2022), which consists of projections of printed fragments of methacrylate through which a light source passes. Graciela Sacco is presented by Galerie Rolf Art (Argentina).
Jamel Shabazz
Jamel Shabazz (1962, New York, United States) is an African American photographer, famous for immortalizing the New York of the 1980s-1990s like no other artist. A pioneer of African American street photography, Jamel Shabazz began his career in his native city in the late 1970s, capturing the forgotten populations of the working-class neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Queens, the West Village and Harlem. The artist’s photographs reveal a large family of anonymous people and bear witness to the unique relationships forged in these communities, as well as to the photographer’s sense of belonging within them, documenting in an unprecedented way the writing of a popular culture that is now so popular. OFFSCREEN presents a very rare selection of his original albums, filled with his first shots taken in his neighborhood. Like a family album, he would show them to his future models to create a space of trust conducive to artistic collaboration. Jamel Shabazz is presented by Bene Taschen (Germany).
Emmanuel Van der Auwera
Whether through filmmaking, video-sculpture, theatre, printmaking or exploring new technologies, Emmanuel Van der Auwera (1982, Brussels, Belgium) investigates essential cultural shifts, questions our visual culture and the relationship between the value of the image and the “value of the emotions in the image”. His work has been exhibited or acquired by institutions such as the Dallas Museum of Art, KANAL – the Centre Pompidou, Contemporary Art Center WIELS, Palais de Tokyo, Pinakothek der Moderne, HEK Basel and many others. A first monograph of the artist’s work has been published by Mercator Fonds and Yale University Press. For OFFSCREEN, he presents the installation “VidéoSculpture XX” (The World’s 6th Sense) (2019). This work explores thermal imaging and surveillance, with the viewer becoming the spectacle of an immersive installation. Emmanuel Van der Auwera is presented by Harlan Levy Projects (Belgium).
Stan Vanderbeek
Stan Vanderbeek (1927, New York, USA – 1984, Columbia, USA) was a prolific multimedia artist known for his pioneering work in experimental film and computer art. He studied at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, in New York (1948-1952), and at Black Mountain College, in Asheville, North Carolina (1949-1950). Vanderbeek’s “Movie-Drome” was recently featured in “Signals: How Video Transformed the World” at the MoMA in New York. At OFFSCREEN, in collaboration with The Film Gallery, the Stan Vanderbeek Archive will be presenting three exceptional works: “Site” (1965), “Ad Infinitum” (1968) and “Panels for the Walls of the World” (1970). Presented for the first time in a 16mm projection, “Site” is a three-screen, silent, black-and-white, 16mm installation showing simultaneous views of a 1964 dance by Robert Morris with Carolee Schneemann as Olympia, in an expression of a “metaphor of architectural and metaphysical space”. Site was preserved from the original negatives by Stan Vanderbeek Archive and Bill Brand. Stan Vanderbeek is presented by The Film Gallery (France).
Elyn Zimmerman
Elyn Zimmerman (1945, Philadelphia, USA) grew up in Los Angeles, California, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from UCLA. Thanks in part to the technology boom in Southern California in the 1960s, an aesthetic of art and technology took root in the artistic community. As a result, the artists involved in the Light and Space artistic movement were among the most influential, and their message and approach resonated with a generation of emerging artists, including Zimmerman. Two delicate installations: “Untitled, Berkeley” (1974) and “White Room” (1975) are presented at OFFSCREEN. The first consists of eight transparent glass panels set against a blank white wall. The second is a set of seven silver prints and seven graphite drawings that explore the sensitive equivalence between light and shadow. Elyn Zimmerman is presented by Galerie Bigaignon (France).
The Grand Garage Haussmann
After the magnificent Hotel Salomon de Rothschild in October 2022, the fair will take place this year in a brutalist, radical architecture. Located at 43 rue Laborde, the 2000 m2 garage has been used till recently as a parking lot and is one of the last survivors of the magnificent buildings built for this purpose in the first half of the 20th century. Most were largely destroyed (garages on rue de Ponthieu by the Perret brothers, on rue Marbeuf for Citroën by Albert Laprade, by Mallet- Stevens on the same street for Alfa Romeo, etc.). The entire Grand Garage will be used for OFFSCREEN, with 4 floors for artists’ installations, and a welcoming lounge.
For Adam Roberts (Paris invisible), “the Grand Garage Haussmann is a building that would seem more at home in Miami, with its sculptural and almost entirely glazed façade, but if you step back a little you can see that it was designed to blend into its Parisian surroundings. Rather than a car park or garage, you could almost imagine this building as a cinema or theatre, with the name of his latest show inscribed on the façade.”
Scenography: LA.M Studio
OFFSCREEN has invited interior architect, designer, and scenographer Léonie Alma Mason to dress the monumental space of the Grand Garage Haussmann, with the support of Maison Pierre Frey.
Léonie Alma Mason created LA.M Studio in Paris in 2014 to work on both private and public projects, serving a demanding clientele sensitive to Léonie’s relationship with culture, travel as well as her eye for detail. LA.M Studio’s manifesto is simple: the identity of a place is always what comes first. Each place is unique and has its own code. The studio strives to optimize points of view, starting from what already exists, and defines its rigorous line through ever more advanced made- to-measure fittings.
