An Exhibition Without Texts Suite for Exhibition(s) and Publication(s), second movement.

With Vito Acconci, Francis Baudevin, Stefan Brüggemann, Delphine Coindet, Gilles Furtwängler, Matt Golden, Idris Khan, Alison Knowles, Loreto Martínez Troncoso, Raffaella della Olga, Francesco Pedraglio, Giandomenico Tonatiuh Pellizzi, Claude Rutault, Aki Sasamoto, Benjamin Seror, Cally Spooner, Amikam Toren, Jacques Villeglé, Gil Joseph Wolman… And for the publication, franck leibovici.

The second movement of the “Suite for Exhibition(s) and Publication(s)” by Mathieu Copeland, “An Exhibition Without Texts” is a direct, simultaneous echo of the first movement, “A Spoken Word Exhibition,” presented at the Jeu de Paume. Whereas the latter questioned the role of words and reading in the exhibition, the second movement provides a counterpoint by addressing the moment when the text becomes image, when writing (in its widest sense) disappears, thereby generating an abstract image and affirming the disappearance of meaning in favour of a different reading. An exhibition is not the illustration of a text. Like the works that compose it and without which it could not exist, it does not call on a paratext and it does not derive from an imposed format. Its form is neither predetermined nor dictated by a presentational text and by its creation in space at a given time.

Presenting superposition and accumulation in the works of Stefan Bruggemann, Matt Golden and Idris Khan, the erasure, tearing and cryptography of the real as brought into play by Jacques Villegle, the repainting and obstruction in the work of Francis Baudevin, Giandomenico Tonatiuh Pellizzi, and Claude Rutault, and the obliteration and disfiguring of Amikam Toren and Gil Joseph Wolman, “An Exhibition Without Texts” is structured around a desire to eliminate all text and all images. This approach to the exhibition in its most formal sense emphasizes the existence of the work through the representation that we ourselves form of it or and the words that we project.