LE MAUVAIS ŒIL – fermé actuellement

LE MAUVAIS ŒIL – fermé actuellement

19.09.2020 - 21.02.2021

The idea for this exhibition was born almost a year ago and its conception began several months ago, well before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some of the themes and works in this project resonate with the challenging months we are going through. The question arose as to whether or not to maintain this exhibition, but we have chosen to keep the project as it was originally conceived, considering also that the works it brings together constitute for some of us the testimonies and signs of a general and vital awareness that we need to develop in the years to come.

With his film The Evil Eye, Clément Cogitore was awarded the prestigious Marcel Duchamp Prize by the Centre Pompidou in 2018, obtained with the help of the FRAC Auvergne, which was responsible for defending his candidacy. The Evil Eye is placed here at the heart of the exhibition, its soundtrack crossing all the spaces, in a dialogue with the other works, like a litany foreshadowing the coming of an inescapable end of the world carried by the persistence of great mythological tales, transfigured by dozens of images for advertising purposes. A poignant elegy borrowing as much from the great myths as from the methods of crowd manipulation most tried and tested by advertising and propaganda, The Evil Eye calls upon the ancient figures of the witch, the preacher and the oracle to illuminate our era with a premonitory and disastrous light.

The Evil Eye, the archaic figure of the anathema, finds its most diverse declinations in this exhibition. Drawing on representations rooted in belief and myth, the evil eye also manifests itself through the evocation of great historical tragedies - war devastation, terrorism, economic disaster - and through the omnipresence of enigmatic, prophetic or threatening female figures who, like the Fates of Roman mythology, seem to weave the threads of a fatal destiny. The evil eye calls as much for superstitions rooted in the collective imagination as for the most current phenomena of belief conveyed by the prognosis - realistic or fantasised - of the inevitable collapse of our civilisation.