Roman Signer Exhibiting “Wasserstiefel” in Touché
Lebanon
April 17, 2019 till June 22, 2019
Touché exhibition
Location
Nabil Makarem Art Center, Beirut, Lebanon
Contact
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Swiss visual artist Roman Signer is participating in Touché collective exhibition, celebrating 10 years of Beirut Art Center. The space will reopen with “Touché! (Gesture, Movement, Action)”, curated by Marie Muracciole and Christophe Wavelet, and with the participation of 20 artists from all over the globe. The Exhibition continues from April 17 to June 22, 2019.
About the Exhibition:
touché (gestures, movement, action) is a collective exhibition that privileges the vitality of experimental practices and the fertility of the dialogue between the arts. touché (gestures, movement, action) brings together the works of artists from Lebanon and the international scene, as an extension of Scènes du geste, an exhibition and performance program curated by Christophe Wavelet at the invitation of Centre national de la Danse and the Festival d’Automne in Paris in 2015, and The Weight of Vision, a seminar presented by Marie Muracciole at Beirut Art Center the same year. The aim of the exhibition is to showcase what body and mind are capable of, once they are motivated by an artistic practice.
Gestures are constituents of the life and history of human societies, and play a role as decisive as words or speech. Without them, there would be neither shared imagination nor collective history. Thus, whether prescriptive or discursive, normative or emancipatory, gestures seek the involvement of both senses and sense. In a manner similar to language, they are inherent to any social contract, and to the possibility of behaving socially. In the realm of art in particular, each gesture brings into play the sensible and the intelligible: body and thought cooperate in solidarity. touché (gestures, movement, action) thus puts the accent on the gesture, albeit approached as an artistic maneuver.
Should the body intervene, it does so apart from any image, and in accordance with an effort that targets the specific and the singular, rather than the generic. For it is at this price that an artistic gesture is capable of invention: dedicated, intended, it invites its recipients to participate in the free interplay of reciprocity. At the same time, it proffers the matter of its reciprocity: its power of transformation engages artists and visitors alike. Opening the way for other, future gestures.
A constellation of artistic, performative, filmic and musical gestures, touché (gestures, movement, action) invites visitors and spectators to be immersed in the makings of artistic practices, in the conditions of experiences they allocate for themselves, and the way they are created in order to become conceivable, and ultimately shared.
Swiss Artist: Roman Signer
Exhibited work: Water Boots (Wasserstiefel), 1986. The work in question will be printed on posters and distributed all over the city, the aim is to make the work circulate.
Description of the work: Signer, who conceived installations as actions, is best known for having laid foundation for a new understanding of sculpture in relation to process, transformation and movement. His installations, thought as experiments, were almost always solitary. He employed objects of everyday use, such as tables, boots, containers, umbrellas and hats, that he would then activate by using, for instance, gunpowder or natural forces such as water and wind. These processes comprised mostly of explosions and collisions, rendering a visually and emotionally intriguing result, which thought of empirical approach as an artistic challenge.
