Mental Matter solo show, 2011.
Espace d’En Bas, 2 rue Bleue, 75009 Paris.
Curator: Jean-Louis Chapuis
Exhibited work: 6 drawings from the series Plans (50 x 65 cm); 2 conceptual diagrams – State of the Art (2011, inkjet print on mat paper laminated on aluminum, 90 x 90 cm, edition 1/5) and Aesthetic Intelligence Yield (2002, inkjet print on mat paper, 60 x 80 cm; edition 1/8); booklet of diagrams Spéculation sur Valeur–Image (inkjet print on 300g mat paper,15 x 21 cm, edition 1/10);
Polygon lab station: video Art vs Intelligence, 18mn, 2002; answers to a questionnaire about aesthetic intelligence sent to a selection of artist, author, thinker, designer, scientist, etc.; various research material on the topic.
Press release
Although rarely exhibited, Raphaële Bidault-Waddington has been developing a unique artistic research practice over the last ten years, collaborating internationally at a high level with companies, academic research labs, politics and urban development agencies. At the Espace d’En Bas project space, she will showcase a series of work from her laboratories, such as drawings and conceptual maps.
The Mental Matter exhibition will be an opportunity to introduce a new episode of the Polgyon, a collaborative research program that RBW launched in 2010 as part of The Incidental Person (after John Latham) at Apex Art in New York (curator: Antony Hudek).
This ambitious and non-conventional research program is more of a long-term adventure, if not an utopia, with the intent to show that an artistic project can produce knowledge and bring original and visionary answers to contemporary issues. Polygon is thus as much a political program as a research-action prototype; or even a “free university” that challenges the standardization of artistic research as put forth according to the Bologna Process.
On the one hand, Polygon’s themes investigate the aesthetics of organizations (immaterial shapes) with topics such as urban conceptual models, the idea of a Democratic Company or the Republic of Images as a green governance prototype. On the other hand, Polygon addresses more fundamental questions that intersect with unsolvable artistic issues, such as the polygon figure and abstraction or the notion of Aesthetic Intelligence, which has been at the heart of RBW’s work for over 10 years and will be the focus of the exhibition at Espace d’En Bas.
Information:
– LIID / Laboratoire d’Ingénierie d’IDées (IDea Engineering Laboratory): www.liid.fr
– Polygon launch in 2010 at Apex Art gallery in NY: www.apexart.org/exhibitions/hudek.htm
– Polygon episode #2 Polygon in Tales Magazine #2, Paris.
– Espace d’En Bas gallery website.
– “Art vs Intelligence” (in French) on vimeo.
