école nationale supérieure d'art

centre national d'art contemporain

médiathèque d'art contemporain

résidences d'artistes

Acclimatation

31/10/08 – 1^st/02/09

Opening on 30/10 at 6 pm

It is difficult to talk about nature without risking commonplaces or a moralising discourse, necessarily restricted to political considerations about an uncertain and sombrely threatening future. Without denying these fears, or the magnitude of the wounds man constantly inflicts on his environment, one also forgets that nature herself can be the cause of her own mutations, digested according to the logic of constant evolution.

The exhibition Acclimatation means to deal very prudently with these mutation phenomena. Not unlike a botanical garden collecting information in order to satisfy both scientific experimentation and public observation, the show seeks to reveal the consequences of these changes on our own environment. Hybrid and mutant objects, crossing the living and the artificial, ambivalent or sometimes facetious images, the works of contemporary artists underscore the complex difficulty of representing nature today. A nature which is neither bucolic nor bruised, seen as a place for experimenting forms and notions, divided between reality and fantasy, conservation and anticipation.

Acclimatation is divided into sections as are natural history museums, separating the show into five successive chapters. The first chapter, The Petrochemical Industry, questions the consequences of our industrial production on the very definition of our environment. Climatology tries to reconstitute micro-climates in the exhibition spaces of the Villa Arson, provoking furtive sensations. Vivarium is by essence dedicated to living things, and to their capacity to confront themselves to lifeless artifice. Arboretum, dedicated especially to vegetation, seeks to offer a landscape in itself, a forest in search of its own identity. Lastly, Planetarium offers a passage towards a future made of science fiction, inventing new territories where every mutation has already occurred .

The project was entrusted to Bénédicte Ramade, an art critic and independent curator, and a specialist in matters concerning ecological art and landscape. She has done doctoral research on the emergence and development of ecological art in the United States. She has just finished a residency in Los Angeles as well as in five states in the west of the US where she was doing her research.

The exhibition features works and new productions by twenty-one European and American artists, some of whom have never been exhibited in France : Gabriela Albergaria, Pascal Bircher, collectif BP, Grégory et Cyril Chapuisat, Donna Conlon, Marti Cormand, Valère Costes, Michel de Broin, Carlee Fernandez, Pearl C. Hsiung, Peter Johannisson, Janice Kerbel, Vincent Kohler, Emmanuel Lagarrigue, Eve-Andrée Laramée, Charles Lopez, Pierre Malphettes, Vincent Mauger, Mariele Neudecker, Miguel Palma, Gyan Panchal, Abigail Reynolds, Katrin Sigurdardottir.

The exhibition will go on until 1^st February 2009.

Catalogue will be published at the Presses du Réel for the french version and at JRP/Ringier for the english one.

Curator : Bénédicte Ramade

This exhibition is supported by Pro Helvetia - Swiss arts council and Mécénat Gaz de France

PRACTICAL INFORMATIONS

The Centre national d’art contemporain is open daily from 2 to 6pm.

Closed on Tuesdays. Free admission.

VILLA ARSON

20 avenue Stephen Liégeard F- 06105 Nice cedex 2

Tel +33 (0) 4 92 07 73 73 - cnac@villa-arson.org

Press contact : Michel Maunier / maunier@villa-arson.org / Tel. +33 (0)4 92 07 73 91