Saâdane Afif Fountain Archives FA. 0254, 0274, 0578, 0597, 0760, 0791, 0859, 0876, 0810, 2008-2021
Offset prints from books and magazines, framed, pencil
150 x 120 cm
With Marcel Duchamp's "Fontaine" as a starting point, Saâdane Afif began in 2008 to collect all the publications, catalogs, guides, and books in which this important work appeared. The pages showing Duchamp's work are torn out and framed to create a new readymade. The frames are hung within a grid drawn in pencil directly on the wall. This structures the variety of sizes and background colors of the different frames, which are shown chronologically–similar to a table of contents. The artist thus built up an archive with the aim of tracing a thousand mentions of the "Fontaine". In 2021 Afif was able to complete the project with the 1000. frame. The books, magazines and catalogs, each missing the page with Duchamp's "Fontaine," are gathered in a shelving system that Afif first showed at Museo Jumex in Mexico in 2019.