SAÂDANE AFIF: THE FOUNTAIN ARCHIVES

SAÂDANE AFIF: THE FOUNTAIN ARCHIVES
19.05.2019 - 29.09.2019

Widely regarded as one of the most emblematic works of the 20th century, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) is the definitive ready-made, a shop-bought urinal that the artist nominated as a sculpture. In that moment, the paradigms of art were disrupted and a new one set. The piece has been reproduced in multiple catalogs, books and magazines throughout the years as the marker of contemporary art’s origin. For The Fountain Archives, French artist Saâdane Afif (Vendôme, 1970) archived each image of Fountain that he discovered in a wide range of publications from around the world. Ripping out each reproduction and framing it, Afif turns it into a file entry, compiling 1001 entries of these bibliographic sources over a 10 year period.

The archive material has also been a source for further research in Afif’s art project, adding layers to the cataloguing process. By preserving and displaying more than 100 years of this unique work’s circulation, his project is intrinsically related to the way we see, define and criticize contemporary art. For his exhibition at Museo Jumex, Afif presents the Augmented section of the archive, a self-reflexive body of images and critical texts that document The Fountain Archives themselves.