mountaincutters at Palais de Tokyo

Artists: mountaincutters

Exhibition title: Morphologies souterraines

Curated by: Adélaïde Blanc

Venue: Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France

Date: June 16 – September 10, 2023

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists, ©Palais de Tokyo and the respective copyright holders

The mountaincutters are a duo of sculptors who, over the last ten years, have been creating proliferating and transitory installations. Repeating forms, shifting objects and varying materials seem to obey some unknowable organisations. Despite their seemingly impenetrable logic, these sculptures remain porous to the sites they inhabit, entering into resonance with the qualities and materials of the spaces and environments surrounding them.

The artists refuse to inscribe their exhibitions and installations in a particular narrative, and each one can be read only by fragments, from an unusable glass seat to a body support structure, from a reproduction of a prehistoric Venus to images of human anatomy taken from dated textbooks. From these spatial haikus emerges an inquiry into the archaeology of forms, an ongoing questioning of the bodies spatiality and their environments.

The duo was created during their studies at the École Supérieure d’Arts et de Design Marseille Méditerranée. In this initial exploratory period, steel structures began to appear in their vocabulary, originally conceived as a tool to work and as a support adapted to a body in pain. Stripped down, modified and re-welded, these structures have continued to evolve over the course of successive installations, adapting to accommodate various objects or to host video images, like most of their works, born from transformations of former sculptures. Through hese dynamics of material reuse and organic evolution, a genealogy of forms and thoughts comes to be inscribed in these works that are marked by alterations and the ageing of the materials.

The care brought to bear upon the formal variations of a single blow-glass recipient and the importance given to traces of rust or flames can be placed in dialogue with the Japanese notion and aesthetic of wabi sabi. The mountaincutters transitory installations share with this 15th century concept a formal simplicity that foregrounds the mechanisms of existence and which values a close attention to the present moment by way of a keen sensorial comprehension of what surrounds us. In the mountaincutters’s assemblages of the mountaincutters, impermanence, incompletion and imperfection are not marks of deficiency but rather the expression of a vital elan that takes shape beyond order, balance and norms.

For their solo exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, the mountaincutters present installations that engage with the building, its fragility and its summer temperatures at a moment when access to the building is reversed because of the summer season. Thermometers, oil, and other liquids register heat variations alongside bronze sculptures of hands and copper casts of neanderthal femurs that graft themselves onto the building and its hot water network. Fused with the site and shaped by its material flows, the enveloping sculptures suggest incapacitated bodies whose prostheses, extensions and tools appear as many strategies of adaptation to a hostile environment.

The artists undertake a poetic excavation of human and animal anatomies by assembling studies of prehistoric bones and representations of tripod fish living in ocean abysses. While the exhibition makes visible divergent and underground morphologies, it also engages visitors’ bodies and invite them to reflect upon the way in which the exhibition space is governed by norms and shaped according to ‘able’ bodies or incapacitated ones.

The artists: mountaincutters

Having worked as a duo ever since their studies at the École Supérieure d’Arts et de Design Marseille Méditerranée, the mountaincutters today live and work in Brussels. Their multidisciplinary practice combines installation and sculpture, as well as drawing, painting, photography and writing. Their site-specific work seeks to establish a formal dialogue with the places in which they exhibit. Steel, clay, blown glass, copper, brass, kapok, diluted agar agar and other liquids are just some of the organic and industrial agents that the mountaincutters recover and reassemble in order to question the relationships between bodies, temporalities and environments.

Their work has been presented in numerous group exhibitions in Belgium, France and internationally, including at the Middelheim Museum (Antwerp, 2021) in the exhibition The holes will be filled again and at HORST/Kanal Centre Pompidou (Brussels, 2022) in The Act of Breathing. They have also had solo exhibitions including defensive condition: humidity + deceleration + fertility at the Centre d’Art Bastille (Grenoble, 2022), ctrl c respiration at the Centre d’Art Neuchâtel (2022), Les indices de la respiration primitive at La Verrière, Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, (Brussels, 2021), Anatomie d’un corps absent at Le Creux de l’Enfer (Thiers, 2019), and SPOLIA (Généalogies fictives) at the Grand Café (Saint-Nazaire, 2018). They have undertaken residencies at La Borne at the CCC (Henrichemont, 2019) and at the Fondation Martel (Cognac, 2020), as well as being named laureates of the Prix Région Sud in 2019. Their works have been acquired by the FRAC PACA (2020), the Middelheim Museum (2021) and the Mudac Musée Cantonal de Design et d’Arts appliqués contemporains de Lausanne (2023).

Curator: ADÉLAÏDE BLANC

Adélaïde Blanc is curator and coordinator of the artistic direction at the Palais de Tokyo. After studying art history and humanities at La Sorbonne (Paris) and La Autónoma (Madrid), she worked at the Frac Haute-Normandie (Rouen) whilst developing her practice as an independent curator. Her research focuses on strategies of infiltration of cultural institutions and on collective, collaborative and non-professional practices that look to go beyond the time and formats of the exhibition.

At the Palais de Tokyo, she has curated exhibitions by artists including Babi Badalov (2016), Abraham Poincheval (2017), and Marianne Mispelaëre (2018). As co-curator of the 15th Lyon Biennale Where Water Comes Together with other Water (2019) and of the group exhibitions Future, Former, Fugitive (2019) and Antibodies (2020) at the Palais de Tokyo, she has worked with artists including Eva L’Hoest, Martin Belou, Koki Tanaka and Florence Jung. In 2022 she accompanied the artistic and wine-making project of Hélène Bertin and César Chevalier, oversaw the 20th anniversary of the Jardin aux habitant·es and coordinated the first chapter of Le Grand désenvoûtement, a long-term project that looks to reflect and act upon the symbolic, social and political 15 dimensions of the Palais de Tokyo.

mountaincutters, Morphologies souterraines, exhibition view, Palais de Tokyo (16.06.2023 – 10.09.2023). Photo: Aurélien Mole