Save the Date : “Material Contingencies” Exhibition
As part of its Graduation Exhibition, Parsons Paris is proud to present the “Material Contingencies” exhibition by the History of Design and Curatorial Studies department.
Address: Mona Bismarck American Center, 34 Avenue de New York, 75116 Paris
Hours: May 17 7pm – 11pm | May 18 12pm – midnight | May 19 12pm – 6pm
The exhibition is free and open to the public.
The History of Design and Curatorial Studies MA is pleased to present Material Contingencies, an exhibition examining contemporary notions of “object” and “objecthood” and how they may or may not materialise.
We live in an age of contradictory relationship with materiality. The avant-gardes of the 1960s-1970s have expanded the field of art to include conceptual and immaterial practices; digital technologies have developed in a seemingly dematerialised realm of networks and interfaces. At the same time, digital economies have a social and environmental impact that is anything but immaterial. We also cannot ignore today’s renewed interest in crafts and materiality in the arts, and how this reveals a need to reclaim the authenticity of an embodied experience.
Where in the past materiality described the physical, tangible and concrete world of objects, this exhibition explores shifting and blurring boundaries to consider a range of potential material forms: an aquarium TV containing fish that do not require feeding, drops of concrete percolating through a coffee machine, electromagnetic waves appearing like a swarm of fireflies—and of course floors, walls, smells, air drafts, our bodies, your bodies.
Material Contingencies attempts to create zones through an assemblage of objects that radiate feelings, reactions and emotions. Each of these objects has a presence—a manner through which they appear to us in the world. This presence may eventually disappear into thin air.
This is the strange contingency of material things.
With works by Francis Alÿs, Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann, Forensic Architecture, Ana Maria Lagos Gallego, Quentin Lazzareschi, Richard Vijgen and Lawrence Weiner.
Material Contingencies is a curatorial project developed by curator Mathilde Sauzet with the students of Parsons Paris History of Design and Curatorial Studies MA Program: Lama Alissa, Pamela Arellano, Jennifer Briasco, Reynaldo Gomez, Renée Hong, Nicolette Kabitsis, Sif Lindblad, Ruchanan Patarapanish, Jorge Torrens