Press Release
Widely regarded as one of the most emblematic works of the 20th century, Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917) is the definitive ready-made, a shop-bought urinal that the artist designated as sculpture. This iconic artwork prompted countless publications and still continues to generate comments in a broad range of research topics. The artist Saâdane Afif (b. 1970) made Fountain's printed dissemination the subject of a monumental project: since 2008, he has been collecting publications, catalogues, guides and books that reproduce a photograph of the seminal piece. The pages showing Duchamp's work have been torn out and framed to build up an unexpected archive of Fountain, that will end with the 1001st entry. The destroyed books, with their missing pages, are then carefully stored on bookshelves in the artist's studio, forming the "passive" part of the project that Afif also calls the "mold".
