Parallels Part 3: Central Heating Visions at CAN Centre d’Art Neuchâtel

Artists: Caroline Mesquita, Tabita Rezaire, Urban Zellweger, Caroline Bourrit, Zsófia Keresztes, Gil Pellaton, Barbezat-Villetard, Natalie Portman, SMS, Mathilde Fernandez

Exhibition title: Parallels Part 3: Central Heating Visions

Curated by: CAN Team

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

Date: September 17 – December 18,2022

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

Central Heating Visions is the third chapter of Parallels. This exhibition, unusually long for the CAN, has been on view since January and follows a particular pattern: the proposals of the artists stands in an architecture that is redesigned for the occasion in independent spaces. The interventions are unveiled progressively in a constant alternation between the rooms opened to the public and those undergoing transformation. In the corridors, staircases and passageways, an installation floods the entire art center of a light that changing according to the atmospheric pressure or the time of year. This work links all the fragments of Parallels; it could be seen as a mesosphere:
a space that separates but at the same time binds the rooms together. All these fragments caught in a continuous flow draw, by their multiplicity, the collective exhibition.

With its glowing corridors and its title that sounds like a cryptic message, Central Heating Visions, joins the notion of perception or premonition with
the evocation of the heating factory that once occupied the building. More than an anecdotal hint, the central heating is the metaphor of the collective thought that transforms this labyrinthine building crossed by arteries, canals, corridors and staircases, into an art center. It is driven by a particular fuel: the determination of the team that found and reshaped this place and those that have succeeded it, the energy of the artists who renew it with each exhibition and the strength of the public that gives it life. These flows, sometimes calm, sometimes chaotic, traverse the heart of this benevolent machine, a place of warmth, of meeting and exchange, of parties sometimes.

Each of the three parts focused on one of the issues of the exhibition. These three facets are reflected in each artistic intervention that forms this skein but also in its rhythm and its general movement. After the first act Astral Border which addressed the question of territory and The Commuter which represented the relationship between intimacy and collectivity, the last chapter takes a more dreamlike path and links the conept of utopia to a force of transformation and renewal. Central Heating Visions is the return point of the spiral curve that forms Parallels.