Introduction

This is ARC‘s first major solo exhibition of the work of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. In preference to the more conventional retrospective mode, the artist has opted for presenting an ensemble of works created in collaboration with an „exhibition team“ – her version of a film crew. Embodying the notions of „shared space“ and „playground“, the exhibition puts the viewer at the heart of the set. Since the early 1990s Gonzalez-Foerster has been pursuing a thoroughly independent line, never hesitating to move beyond the art field, push back its frontiers and explore its relationship with such other domains as cinema, architecture, fashion, music and literature. She has built her oeuvre around „space“, beginning with the intimacy of Chambres and working through films and environments to her extreme urban situations and landscapes. In ARC‘s modernist architectural setting, Expodrome brings together a number of „space-times“ that trigger singular experiences: Solarium, La Fée Electricité, La Jetée, Promenade, Panorama, Cosmodrome and Cinéma. These environments – visual, sound-based, physical – make up an exploratory journey „on the edge of the exhibition“. For Gonzalez-Foerster, the exhibition is the medium: designing potential spaces and exploring limitations are ways of producing situations a little like staged scenes with which viewers can engage as they move through the exhibition.

The written and visual collaborations making up the catalogue played a large part in the genesis of Expodrome. With contributions by Jean-Max Colard, Francesca Grassi, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Nicolas Ghesquière, Lisette Lagnado, Ange Leccia, Philippe Rahm and Angeline Scherf, the catalogue consists of ten journals, one for each contributor, with lots of illustrations. It has been based on the concept of the exhibition, as it is made up of independent entities, and presents specific perspectives on the work of the artist through the light of literature, fashion and architecture.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster has already shown several times at ARC, with Numéro Bleu (1991), L’hiver de l’amour (1994), Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno (1998) and Voilà (2000).