Bordeaux. Elfi Turpin’s first curatorial project since his arrival at the head of Frac Méca, “Chambers, Ghosts & Digitales” reconnects with the genre of the signature exhibition and offers a poetic meditation on the theme of the bedroom, envisaged as a tangible space on the threshold of a myriad of alternative realities. The room “extends the experience of virtuality »we can read in the exhibition booklet. It offers privileged access to dreamlands and digital worlds that populate a borderless cyberspace. Thus considered, the room becomes a “ heterotopia» in its own right, in the sense given to it by Michel Foucault in Other Spaces (1967): it is a locality having “the power of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several locations which are in themselves incompatible”. The bedroom – and by extension, the artist’s studio – is also this“place of one’s own” cherished by Virginia Woolf, this space of emancipation alone capable of bringing virtual destinies into existence. If the bias of the exhibition is as attractive as it is singular, the subject manages to remain intelligible throughout while skilfully avoiding falling into theoretical overabundance.
On the edge of the real and the virtual
The selection of works made by Elfi Turpin is convincing in more than one way: the curator succeeds in developing a coherent and relevant corpus while operating a harmonious dialogue between historical works from the Frac collection and much more recent pieces, some having been produced especially for the occasion by emerging artists. The theme offers the institution the opportunity to bring out some masterpieces from its reserves: the emblematic Oil TV (1978-1982) by Nam June Paik, an invitation to silence in the midst of the frenzy of images, naturally finds its place at the beginning of the journey while a little further on, the Cell #2 (1991) by Absalon marvelously illustrates the way in which domestic space, here encapsulated in a sanitized cell, can become a “resistance device” to use the words of the artist himself. The psychoanalysis room-cabinets imagined by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, How the analyzes end (1994-1997), allow us to approach the bedroom as a closed space offering privileged access to the unconscious. The Frac can also be proud of having obtained loans of high quality works for this exhibition. “Chambers, Ghosts & Digitales” is indeed a unique opportunity to discover the skinned workshop – the Borg (1976) (see ill.) – by Heidi Bucher, rarely shown. This striking installation was created by the Swiss artist by applying gauze, liquid latex and pearlescent pigments to the walls of his studio located in the cold room of a former butcher’s shop. The glass-walled room A song of love (2019-2022) by Laura Lamiel, halfway between psychic space and real place, is also worth a look.
