Arno Bouchard
Arno Bouchard / Devouring
November 12–14, 2022
Lucid Interval
Paris, France

With the end of sacred rites and religion, sacrifice is now diffusing through Western society like a tumor. Permanent sacrifice of the self on the altar of narcissism (“Naked, I am free”), and sacrifice of the ‘other’ to whom singularity is denied, by conformity, mediocrity and/or rotten joy – a Schadenfreude – on the globalized stage of the contemporary theatre of cruelty.

Beginning from this point, the operation in which Arno Bouchard engages consists in resetting a ritual by starting from its most original and cutting-edge possibility: a sacrificial rite, with the intention of returning to the centre the danger inherent in all reciprocity, thus creating by his performances the appearance of a ghost of love. I say “ghost of love” firstly because we stay within the order of representation, but also because to achieve this surging, the risk – whether physical or mental – becomes literally omnipresent, suffocating, as if the specter of suffering haunted the entire experience of these two performances conceived in Japan between 2017 and 2020, whether they were set in still images, as for one, or animated, for the second.

Arno Bouchard studied literature and cinema. He is a multidisciplinary artist – film, photography, sculpture, performance – who lives and works in Paris. Words remain the main material he works with before choosing the medium likely to express his ideas.

OTHER ANNOUNCEMENTS & EVENTS
  • Adam Pendleton: To Divide By
    Sep 22, 2023 – Jan 15, 2024
    Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum
    St. Louis, USA

    “What is your name?” “Where are you from?” “How did you end up here?” “Can you feel it?” “Does it hurt?” With these and other questions, the American artist Adam Pendleton’s solo exhibition at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum sets up an elaborate call-and-response network that articulates a sense of history as fragmented poetics. The exhibition will showcase a polyvocal assemblage of new and recent paintings, drawings, and video portraits that together reveal Pendleton’s interest in creating a conversation between mediums, as well as his belief in abstraction’s capacity to destabilize and disrupt. (more…)