[nettime-fr] Claire Fontaine, COUNTER-POISON at Komplot

[Komplot <fabiendefendini@gmail.com>]

Claire Fontaine
COUNTER-POISON

Solo exhibition opening on June 20th 2008, 6pm
On view by appointment until July 18th and work installed on the facade for duration of the year

Vernissage le 20 juin 2008, 18h
Visites de l'exposition sur rendez-vous jusqu'au 18 juillet et installation en façade pour l'année

Opening 20 juni 2008, 18u
Tentoonstelling te bezichtigen tot 18 juli op afspraak, kunstwerk aan
de buitenmuur doorlopend te bezichtigen tot het einde van het jaar

Komplot
30, rue Jourdanstraat
1060 Bruxelles/Brussel
www.kmplt.be
info@kmplt.be
T: +32 484 713 175

With the support of / Avec le soutien de / Met de steun van: Galerie
Neu (Berlin), Ministère de la culture de la Communauté française
Wallonie Bruxelles, Mady Novalet - Van Vooren, Schepen van
Nederlandstalige Aangelegenheden en het College van Burgemeester en
Schepenen van Sint-Gillis, Contour (Mechelen)

Press release:
Claire Fontaine, Counter-Poison

For her first solo show in Brussels, Claire Fontaine presents at
Komplot an installation that takes place inside and outside the
exhibition space entitled /Counter-Poison/.

Claire Fontaine is a collective artist born in 2004 in Paris, where she
lives and works. After lifting her name from a popular brand of school
notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a "ready-made artist" and
began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art, that often looks
like other people's work. She works in neon, video, sculpture, painting
and writing, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation
of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to
define contemporary society.

In this exhibition Claire Fontaine explicitly addresses the destructive
aspect of contemporary urban development and its consequences on the
life of the inhabitants of cities. Capitalism is a sinisterly
benevolent regime. It takes care of us in order to dispossess us better
of our powers, it looks after us in order to force us to work, it
distracts us to make us forget about everything it annihilates, but
above all it penetrates us so deeply that we cannot get rid of it
without tearing away all our vital organs. The sovereigns of the past
had the power to let live and make die, the governments of today have
the power to make live and let die, because if the sanitary system, or
the tight network of the different social services abandon us we can
find no outside where a non-administrated life would be possible.
Substances or practices become, according to the moment, responsible
for the murder of the poor, that in reality is nothing else than the
calibrated effect of the contemporary mode of production.

/Capitalism Kills (Love)/, 2008, the neon sign, that mimics commercial
language, informs us of the fact (banal and even idiotic) that
capitalism kills, and its flashing element adds the word love, as an
ulterior gloss. But this so called "banality of goodness", that
imitates the terrorist jargon of dissuasive propaganda, conceals the
germs of a painful irony. The way we desire is not distinguishable from
the way we consume, our libidinal economy is a war economy, with its
controlled inflation and its black market.

Inside the exhibition space, itself a building waiting to be
demolished, Claire Fontaine presents the video /Counter-Poison/, 2004,
which retraces a journey to the core of a ruin. The abandoned theatre
in a popular Glasgow neighbourhood waits patiently for the arrival of
the excavators, whilst local kids destroy day-by-day the stage left
without a public and burn the empty seats. At night wild animals find a
shelter there, one can spot a fox and a pigeon, allegories of
clandestine life in urban zones.

What this blind and dumb descent can be the antidote to is up to the
spectator to guess. The building has now been demolished and nothing
remains but these images accompanied by the obsessive breathing
resonance of the cameraman.

Nothing is more alien to this trip than the experience of the flâneur.
In search of a shelter, or avoiding the up and coming of the New, the
roamer with an uncertain trajectory drives us to the off stage of
something which is already even too familiar to us.

Paris, June 2008

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