With the participation of Elena Filipovic (Director, Kunsthalle Basel), Jennifer Flay (gallerist and art fair director), and Benoît Piéron (artist).
Conceived by Clément Dirié, Expologie is a cycle of events about emblematic exhibitions in the history of contemporary art. In 2021, the first season focused on the 1990s in France. In 2022, the second season will look at three landmark monograph exhibitions in the 2010s that were particularly important in terms of their curation: Cady Noland, MMK, Frankfurt, 2018; Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects without Specific Form, WIELS, Brussels; Fondation Beyeler, Basel; MMK, Frankfurt, 2010-2011, and Pierre Huyghe, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2013.
In 2010-2011, Elena Filipovic, then curator at WIELS in Brussels, undertook a radical initiative. In designing and organising a travelling retrospective exhibition of Cuban-American artist Feliz Gonzalez-Torres (1957-1996), she also decided to do this in an unconventional, open-ended manner. In each of the three locations, the exhibition was held twice: the first time according to Elena Filipovic, and the second – using the same or different works –, according to an invited artist whose work bears affinities to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s vision of art: Danh Vo in Brussels, Carol Bove in Basel, and Tino Seghal in Frankfurt.
With Elena Filipovic, Jennifer Flay – a gallerist and friend of Felix Gonzalez-Torres in the 1990s – and Benoît Piéron, we will revisit the genesis, the issues, challenges, and surprises of such a curatorial adventure and look at how the experimental conception of this exhibition sought to reflect the radical quest of a by-now historic artist, especially into the fragility of artworks, the notion of authority, and the idea of survival.
Clément Dirié
An art historian, critic, and exhibition curator, Clément Dirié is the editorial director of JRP|Editions, a publishing house for which he has edited numerous works and DVDs on the history of exhibitions in the 20th and 21st centuries. An attentive observer of both current artistic creation and the genealogies of the history of contemporary art, he is the author of a number of essays on art and design, such as Iris Clert. L’Astre ambigu de l’avant-garde [“Iris Clert: Ambigous star of the avant-garde”] (Hermann). He is the curator of the 23rd Prix Fondation Pernod Ricard, 2022.
