[spectre] visiting Paris in spring

[Andreas Broeckmann]

dear friends,

i had chance to spend a whole week in paris recently, on invitation 
of the conference 'Programmation orientee art', about software and 
art, (http://www.creca.org)and the Goethe Institut 
(http://www.goethe.de/paris), and saw a few things which might be 
interesting for those of you who pass through there in coming weeks 
and months:

- exhibition by Anri Sala: Entre chien et loup / When the Night Calls it a Day
25 March-16 May 2004
Musee d'Art moderne de la ville de Paris /ARC au Convent des Cordeliers
http://www.mam.paris.fr
it's an exhibition of 5 recent video installations, strong work and 
definitely worth seeing; the show is going to Hamburg's 
Deichtorhallen afterwards, 13 May-1 August 2004; there's an 
illustrated catalogue; two discussion events with Anri Sala are 
planned: 27 April with Carsten Hoeller, 4 May with Bruno Latour.

- Olga Kisseleva kindly pointed me to this exhibition; she will be 
showing work in different Russian cities over the coming months: 
http://www.kisseleva.org

- until the coming weekend, the EXIT festival will be running in 
Creteil, in the south of Paris; the show with the theme 
'Lumiere!/Light!' was curated by Richard Castelli and includes a 
number of interesting kinetic and light installations, notably 
several works by the Swedish artist Christian Partos, Erwin Redl's 
Matrix II, and Tania Ruiz' 'Plaza II'. Granular Synthesis are 
performing on Friday and Saturday, and the festival finishes with a 
long 'Nuit Electro'.
http://www.maccreteil.com

- the Musee de la Musique, near La Villette, shows an exhibition 
'Espace Odyssee' that deals with the expansion and transgression of 
concepts of space in music since 1950; the show which runs until 5 
September includes very interesting audio and video material from the 
recent history of music, from Xenakis and Stockhausen (performing in 
the 1970 World Expo pavillion in Japan), through a rare video of a 
live performance by Sun Ra (from Phill Niblocks collection) to Riochi 
Ikeda's sound pieces. (They will hopefully still do something about 
the two abysmal video projections in the 'Video' section; luckily, 
the things i mentioned all run on monitors. The nicely done website 
for the show is linked from 
http://www.cite-musique.fr/francais/musee/ and, strangely, not from 
other parts of their website.)

- the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts on the Seine, 
opposite the Louvre, hosts an exhibition called 'densite +/-0' which 
includes work of mixed quality, but which i thought was very 
interesting as a well-conceived show in which even mediocre works 
strengthen each other by adding to the experience of the different 
aspects of the theme. personally, i particularly liked the works by 
Mark Bain, Carsten Nicolai and Annika Stroem, but there is plenty of 
other stuff, too; there's a catalogue, and they hold a discussion 
there with the artists on 7 april before the show closes on 11 april. 
http://www.ensba.fr

- the review 'Multitude' has a new issue out, No. 15: art 
contemporain: la recherche du dehors, which contains illustrated 
articles about many recent politically engaged art projects - a great 
reader for catching up with the debate about contemporary art 
practices in touch with reality. http://multitudes.samizdat.net

- a new organisation is being set up, called CiTu, which will 
catalyse art and research efforts in Paris in the future; the 
University of Paris 1 (Sorbonne) and 8 (St. Denis) are both involved 
- i guess there will be more news as the thing gets its feet on the 
ground.

best regards,

-a