Parallels Part 1: Astral Border at CAN Centre d’Art Neuchâtel

Artists: Barbezat-Villetard, Adrian Ganea, Mathis Gasser, Fatima Wegmann Guinassi, Maria Guta, Lauren Huret, Yannic Joray, Youssef Limoud, Lou Masduraud, mountaincutters, Léo Natorp, Jorge Raka

Exhibition title: Parallels Part 1: Astral Border

Curated by: CAN Team

Venue: CAN Centre d’Art Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

Date: January 30, 2021 – April 24, 2022

Photography: Sebastian Verdon / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and CAN Centre d’Art Neuchâtel

Parallels is fifteen solo exhibitions that will be held side by side and one after the other, intertwining throughout the year 2022. Linked together by a network of corridors, they appear and disappear over the course of the year in a movement of conjunctions and alternations. For this purpose, the spaces of the CAN are reshaped into five rooms of unequal sizes. These allow the artists to define all the parameters for the display of their work, while taking part in a common history. The CAN team invites the public to navigate from one room to another through this fluctuating constellation where each new composition reveals a temporary arrangement of multiple intensities.

Parallels is a fragmented construction and although it is conceived as a series of independent cells, it illustrates the challenges which lie within the format of a group exhibition. Among these challenges, it is the correlation between a work of art and the space in which it is exhibited that has guided this curatorial choice. Some works require the presence of an audio source, and others special lighting or a rearrangement of the walls. Some exhibition rooms must be able to accommodate one-off projects during regular events; they must be open to practices such as performance, video or dance. What criteria should be used to assign a space of a certain type or size to one practice rather than another? How do we decide on the allocation of linear meters

on a wall or allow a certain occupation of a territory by a certain artist? In the case of Parallels, the corridors form an airlock that separates the CAN from the outside and leads to the various interventions in the dispersed spaces. The resulting fragmented experience, both through this architecture and through the sparse rhythm of the invitations, allows for a free interpretation of the exhibition’s narrative and lets the visitor’s autonomy sweep away any authoritarianism. The plurality and variety of the sources, both in form and content, leads to a particular reading. For if the exhibition can be conceived as an arrangement of works fixed in time and space, it can also become an oscillating or pendular movement, two sides of the same coin, a miraculous chaotic flow or a constellation of parallel worlds that unfolds its ever-renewed dynamic between individual logic and the activation of collective thought.