“BANG! Nomade” at Station Beirut
April 18, 2017 till April 30, 2017
Bang at Station Beirut
“BANG! Nomade” is exhibiting at Station Beirut from April 18 to 30, 2017. The itinerant version of the exhibition “Bang! History of the comic strip in Geneva” focuses on cartoonists in Geneva since the 1990s. It is indeed during this decade that a generation of authors imposed upon the city a map of the international comic.
Alex Baladi, Frederik Peeters, Nadia Raviscioni, Tom Tirabosco and Pierre Wazem are part of the renewal movement of Francophone comic strip. Leaving behind the entertainment aspect, these authors are adhering more to personal stories, often in connection with autobiographies. Distancing themselves from the standard albums created in color, they express themselves mainly in black and white, and give room to formal invention.
Reducing these comics as authors would, however, be abusive. Several cartoonists, no less talented, participate to the vitality of the Geneva scene, not to mention authors such as Zep or Buche, whose reputations are well established. The sum of these individualities with well-defined styles does not build a “Geneva school” of comic strip creation, but rather shows a multitude of personal practices, each offering a powerful graphic and narrative universe.
It is, therefore, rather the product of a sum of strong personalities feeding each other that resides the peculiarity of the comic strips in Geneva. Bang! Nomad is not limited to a purely retrospective approach, the exhibition integrates the work of young authors from the Haute Ecole d’Arts et de Design of Geneva, which embodies many original promises for the future of the medium. The scenography is composed of modular elements, allowing for the adaptation of the piece to different places of exhibition. It plays with a complementarity between verticality and horizontality. The walls thus present sequences of plates under plexiglass, selected for their graphic and plastic qualities, while the inclined plates offer a more intimate relation to works, conducive to immersion in reading. Focusing on sequences of plates, this panel of works covers a broad spectrum of the field of possibilities of the comic strip. Autobiography, minimalism, an intimate diary, or experimentation, as well as reporting, science fiction, humor, fantasy or manga, give the viewer an opportunity to get an overview of the comics made in Geneva.
More about BANG HERE
More about Station Beirut HERE
