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Latitudes/RK; Frédéric Deval & Lysiane Gauthier © CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux
Curators

4.543 billion. The matter of matter

CAPC musée d’art contemporain Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France, 29 June 2017–7 January 2018

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An exhibition with works by: A.J. Aalders, Lara Almarcegui, Maria Thereza Alves, Félix Arnaudin, Amy Balkin, Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck in collaboration with Media Farzin, Bernd Becher and Hilla Becher, Étienne Denisse, Hubert Duprat, Giulio Ferrario, Ângela Ferreira, Anne Garde, Ambroise-Louis Garneray, Terence Gower, Rodney Graham, Ilana Halperin (also at the Université de Bordeaux’s zoology department), Marianne Heier, Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller, Lucas Ihlein and Louise Kate Anderson, Jannis Kounellis, Martín Llavaneras, Erlea Maneros Zabala, Nicholas Mangan, Fiona Marron, Alexandra Navratil, Xavier Ribas, Alfred Roll, Amie Siegel, Lucy Skaer, Alfred Smith, Rayyane Tabet, Pierre Théron, Pep Vidal, Alexander Whalley Light, Stuart Whipps (also at the Musée des Beaux-Arts) as well as documents and ‘meaningful objects’ lent by the archives of the CAPC, the Archives Bordeaux Métropole, the Archives départementales de la Gironde, and the geology collection of the UFR Sciences de la Terre et de la Mer, Université de Bordeaux.


‘4.543 Billion. The Matter of Matter’ was a group exhibition featuring over thirty artists and more than a hundred works. The exhibition explored the intersection of art production, cultural histories, and art collections with ecological processes and geological timescales. It presented a continuum of materials and temporal landscapes – including films, works on paper, photographs, sculptures, documents, and other meaningful things – and sprang from the CAPC building’s former life as a warehouse for colonial commodities whose limestone walls were once deep in the ground and whose wooden beams were once part of a forest.

A central proposal of the exhibition is that works of art are part of geophysical history as much as art history. ‘4.543 billion’ attempted to take into account both a micro-local and a planetary perspective, and to rethink some of the histories of art as fragments of broader narratives about the Earth and how our place in it has been represented. What is at stake when art and museums take on greater temporal and material awareness? How might they move beyond a spatial framework of “think globally, act locally”, to “think historically, act geologically”?

The exhibition took a situated view of the past resisting an undifferentiated narrative in which modernity in general is at fault for global ecological disarray, or that humanity in an invariably abstract sense must take responsibility. Accordingly, the artists often addressed the ramifications of past and present colonial forces, the specific roles and purposeful effects of individuals, political practices, states or corporations in an account of how mineral agents and organic processes have intertwined with and underpinned culture. Several of the more documentary projects traced the fraught relationships between Modern art, the museum, and wealth created through extractive industry, combining approaches framed by Earth sciences with colonial history, sociology and political reportage. Yet other works took a more atmospheric, filmic, sculptural or graphic approach to extraction, economy, energy and global human and non-human exchanges, whether orbiting around sunlight, forests, synthetic materials derived from fossil fuels, or the services and substances entailed in the buildings that display art.
 CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux
7, rue Ferrère
33000 Bordeaux
France
www.capc-bordeaux.fr

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@paysagesbx17

 1 July 2017, 11am: Curators' guided tour to the friends of CAPC.

 19 October 2017, 2pm.
 16 November 2017, 2pm.
 14 December 2017, 2pm.
 4 January 2018, 2pm.
Guided visit to Ilana Halperin’s ‘The Rock Cycle’ (2017) intervention at the Salle des Collections de l'Unité de Formation de Biologie, Université de Bordeaux.

 8 November 2017, 5:30–7pm:
Jam Session #1—Guided tour by Terence Gower (participating artist) and Bruno Cahuzac (Professor, UFR Sciences de la Terre et de la Mer, Université de Bordeaux Montaigne)

 15 November 2017, 4:30–8pm:
‘The Return of the Earth: Ecologising art history in the Anthropocene’
Lecture by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, conversation between Xavier Ribas and Ângela Ferreira, convened by Latitudes. Free access. Simultaneous translation.

 6 December 2017, 5:30–7pm:
Jam Session #2—Guided tour by Isabelle Kanor (Head of Le Labo de lettres, association dealing with cultural issues on the Caribbean and colonization), and Charlotte Bouvier and Remi Cazamajor (Inélia).

booklet-CAPC-DSCF0027

‘4.543 billion’ free exhibition booklet
Edited by: Latitudes and Myrtille Bouregeois;
Publisher: CAPC musée;
Texts by: Latitudes;
Graphic Concept: Zak Group;
Format: 148 x 210 mm, 40/44 pp and PDF download
Language: English & French editions;
Print-run: 500;
Date of Publication: June 2017
 English PDF (8.4 MB)
 French PDF (9.2 MB)

Organised and produced by CAPC musée as part of the cultural season Paysages Bordeaux 2017. Within the exhibition framework, Latitudes led the month-long residency programme ‘Geologic Time’ at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Alberta, Canada.

Exhibition coordination:
Alice Cavender (CAPC)

Generously supported by:
Pro Helvetia
INÉLIA
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