Martine Syms at Lafayette Anticipations
On one hand, Lebanese artist Mohamad Abdouni works to preserve stories that are incomplete or on the verge of disappearing. With “Soft Skills”, he imagines a “ homecoming ” to Lebanon’s Bekaa region, focusing on his childhood and teenage years during which a restrictive masculinity was forced upon him. As an adult, he now embodies an identity that his child was struggling to even imagine, and he looks back on his past with a combination of blissful nostalgia and seriousness tinged with humor. He lingers on family figures, archives and knick-knacks, and recalls the mythical or monstrous characters who still fill his imagination. The artist re-examines his desires as a queer boy, the impossible incarnation of heterosexual masculinity and the homo-eroticism of camaraderie. Soft Skills is a queer (re)reading, presenting a gleeful reinvention of the ways one behaves and asserts oneself.
On the other hand, on the eve of her first retrospective in France, American artist Martine Syms is inviting visitors to discover an impressive work of art that spreads across all floors of the Fondation. This hybrid space becomes a store of a new kind, made of reproductions of elements from his Los Angeles studio, from the façade of the building to his office. It creates a bridge between public and private life, what’s visible and what’s unreachable, the intimate and the collective, thus recounting a particular story about our culture and the places that make it up. The artist presents a kaleidoscopic experience in which existential questions are embodied in the artworks, then transformed into prints.
During this double inauguration, we met Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, Chris Dercon, Martin Bethenod, Guillaume and Constance Houzé alongside the artists.
Photos: Michaël Huard
