On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Frac Franche-Comté's installation at the Cité des Arts, designed by Kengo Kuma, and the 40th anniversary of the Frac, the exhibition will be devoted to works from the collection acquired since 2013. Ten years ago, the Frac moved to the Cité des Arts, a new building designed by Kengo Kuma in the heart of Besançon. Since then, no less than 70 exhibitions have been held there, featuring the work of more than 540 artists. Several hundred works have come to populate the exhibition spaces, taking over their volumes, leaving a more or less faithful memory of their ephemeral passage in those who have encountered, contemplated, and sometimes activated them.
Since 2006, the Frac Franche-Comté collection has been structured around the question of Time and its corollaries (duration, movement, space, entropy, memory, etc.). It has opened up, progressively and logically, to works of sound, performance, immateriality, or even to other resolutely transdisciplinary works, so numerous are the artists who today are inspired by or seize other artistic territories that share the exploration of the temporal dimension, so numerous are the creators from these other fields who choose to venture into the field of visual arts. And perhaps we will remember those monographic and collective exhibitions which, echoing the collection, were part of this interdisciplinary dialogue, notably "Sound Houses" with Alvin Lucier and Tom Johnson for music, "Montag ou la Bibliothèque à venir" for literature, or more recently "Rose Gold" by Cécile Bart, "Dancing Machines" and "Danser sur un Volcan" for dance.
The exhibition presented today proposes to revisit this history through works from the collection already shown over the last ten years. It is enriched by new pieces, never before shown here, as they were recently acquired. Among the first are works by Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Robert Breer,
Susanna Fritscher, Ryoji Ikeda, Georgina Starr, Esther Ferrer, and among the latter, installations by William Forsythe and La Ribot, as well as videos by Anne Rochat and Abdessamad El Montassir.
All deal with the question of the body, whether physical or social: the solitary bodies of Robert Breer's Float, with its anthropomorphic dimension, gliding slowly through space, or Georgina Starr's fragile dancer suspended in the air; the united bodies of Esther Ferrer's twin silhouettes, those of Anne Rochat and her brother sharing their oxygen at the bottom of a lake, or those of the queer musicians and performers set up by Boudry / Lorenz, seeking harmony and echoing other bodies, those of the invisible, the forgotten and the minorities in which La Ribot and Abdessamad El Montassir are interested.
But also those of the visitors invited to physically experience the installations of William Forsythe and Susanna Fritscher, or to immerse themselves in that of Ryoji Ikeda to experiment with the limits of visual and sound perception.
Finally, the works themselves, which all fit into the vacant space of the exhibition rooms to bring it to life for a time, like figures of emptiness.
