This exhibition has been put together by the team behind the DRAW Project, a joint artistic adventure originating in New York in the early 2010s. It was the initiative of the artist Tomas Vu. DRAW was conceived as an international platform dedicated to contemporary drawing and brings artists from different backgrounds together around one simple idea: using drawing as a place for meeting, exchanging and experimenting.
Since it was first created, DRAW has travelled all over the world, undergoing transformations at every port of call, in countries including the United States, Chile, the Philippines and China. Each exhibition brings together artists of different generations, cultures and practices, creating new conversations through drawing, which becomes more than a medium, but rather a common language, enabling very diverse sensibilities and experiences to talk to each other.
As the years have gone by, the project has grown into an international community of artists and partners, with this collaborative dimension at the heart of its identity. Each presentation is an opportunity for new encounters and fresh exchanges, ensuring that DRAW is a constantly evolving movement, jointly constructed through the people and places which host it. Now DRAW is passing through Brest and adding artists from our own region to the exhibition. A quarter of the hundred or so artists on show live or work in Brittany. At the centre of this new DRAW event, a special place is devoted to Tomas Vu, the inspiration behind the project, with an ‘exhibition in the exhibition’. Artist and curator Rafael Domenech also wanted to pay tribute to Anjela Duval (1905–1981), whose collection of writings was co-published by Passerelle this year, by selecting excerpts from the book and displaying them on the walls of the exhibition.
At a time when the discourse of fear is gaining ground, when simplistic narratives set individuals against each other and when false information blurs our understanding of the world, art and culture would appear to be more essential than ever. Art is not an entertainment reserved for the few, but a tool for emancipation, reflection and sharing. It helps us develop our critical faculties, question evidence and resist imposed certainties. It opens up spaces where there may be complexities, where disagreement may be expressed, where everyone can encounter points of view that differ from their own. Culture reminds us that our societies are constructed by dialogue, curiosity and knowledge, and not by rejecting other people and turning in on oneself. It allows us to imagine different futures, to construct a community despite our differences and to defend the idea that every person has a place in the collective narrative. This is the ambition of the DRAW Project, working through the artists it brings together and the exchanges it makes possible. By turning drawing into a space for meeting and shared creation, it affirms that cooperation, listening and joint intelligence are forces well capable of providing a response to the divisions of our times.
Loïc Le Gall, co-curator
Director of Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain, Brest
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This is not an exhibition; it is a publication, a document of its own making, an exquisite corpse of relationships past, current, and future. It is a response and push against collapsing times and the mainstream of individualism.
LET’S BE CLEAR, WITHOUT COMMUNITY THERE IS NO LIBERATION.
But let’s not be naïve: community is not a simple thing, or a noun to be brushed off lightly like a layer of watercolor. It takes work, and it is work. Taking its title from a book by Alphonso Lingis, this project brings together a large group of artists, writers, and designers to think collectively, explore the conditions of living, and build something anew. The community of those who have nothing in common is an attempt to write a visual poem of fragments.
Rafael Domenech, co-curator
