Sticky Objects at Les Bains-Douches

Artists: Hélène Carbonnel, cluelesS, Fang Dong, Frieder Haller, Rafael Moreno

Exhibition title: Sticky Objects

Curated by: Marion Vasseur Raluy

Venue: Les Bains-Douches, Alençon, France

Date: April 28 – July 7, 2023

Photography: Romain Darnaud / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Les Bains-Douches, Alençon

One day, a father dies. The only message he leaves behind is a letter in a chest of drawers. Despite the search carried out by his children, the letter is never found. Instead, the chest of drawers remains inexplicably empty. It continues to exist, down through the years. It becomes, without anyone realizing it, the object of a kind of knowledge that is never revealed, the object of the secret. From one generation to the next, the object’s original story vanishes yet never ceases to be with us. Thus in our existence there are objects that stick and remain attached to our lives. There are symbolic objects that are infused by society (family jewels, dinnerware, a silver spoon, an article of clothing, handbags). There are objects that proclaim one’s status, there are objects that conceal their stories. There are objects soiled by their uses and by the abuses they made possible. These objects stick in our hearts and to our hands, occasionally dirtying or impeding us.

The show Sticky objects offers viewers a look back over the history of objects and their close relationship to our emotions by exploring their appearance in the visual arts. Based in particular on Sara Ahmed’s essay Happy Object the show focuses on the emotions that objects are loaded with, disgust, attraction, joy, sorrow, and so on. In her essay, the English sociologist demonstrates how certain objects are assigned an emotion (happiness or sadness), taking the example of the personal accomplishment of marriage symbolized by a wedding ring. Ahmed tries to deconstruct the normative representation of happiness. The question of affects has been a full-fledged subject of sociology for several years now, and like Frédéric Lordon, Ahmed interrogates emotions’ place in society. In Lordon’s work, affects are steered by capitalist society to correspond to economic demands, sadness encouraging consumption and depression encouraging inaction. These injunctions led me to question the emotional burden of objects circulating in art. Objects run through uses, they become works of art, frozen in the space of the exhibition. They then come back, sometimes forever, sometimes fleetingly, sticky objects. Without ever belonging to us, they haunt us and seem to have spoken to us about something we continue to hear. Would art objects have a magical faculty for resisting the emotional injunctions addressed to them by occasioning the appearance of unexpected emotions?

In Sticky Objects, the elements making up the show mainly come from the esthetic vocabulary that’s peculiar to the living arts. Puppets, decorative objects, and scale models fill Les Bains-Douches. This invitation to make the connection with the living arts is a sly nod to the figure of Piero Heliczer, a constant presence in the art center. CluelesS, Fang Dong, and Rafael Moreno use objects to produce sculptures that become small designer objects and objects for the theater set. Hélène Carbonnel deconstructs the kinds of talk that are heard, only to retain the errors and stuttered bits, as if to bring out what is left unsaid, what needs to be truly heard. Finally, Frieder Haller, with his new film, takes us to a world of symbolic characters in a cut-out setting who are looking to escape their diabolical nature.

The objects produced by the artists speak out, break free, get down to work. They seek other ways to exist than what memory and heritage permit. If objects are indeed sticky, by being placed together perhaps another symphony may be heard, and their sticky nature can become a strange and new skin from which we can transform ourselves.

Hélène Carbonnel was born in 1989 in Paris. She is an author, director, and programmer of podcasts, sound artworks and videos. Since 2017 she has been working with several studios and has created many Transferts. Drawing on 4 episodes for her raw materials, she produced Trash Talk, the sound piece featured in the present exhibition.

The designer duo cluelesS, made up of Saloméja Jacquet and Clara Stengel, has been developing a repertory of objects for day-to-day use meant to resolve problems in reality by creating a world that is slightly out of synch with our own. “To be in one’s world” is perhaps the most accurate way of interpreting the word “clueless.” Skirting the pejorative connotations of the word, which can apply to someone who is ignorant, “clueless” should rather be understood in the sense of someone who defies reality. (extract from a text by Katia Porro for the exhibition Loud Object at In Extenso, Clermont Ferrand in 2022)

Clara Stengel was born in 1989 in Paris. After graduating from ENSBA (Paris), she took a CAP in cabinetmaking in 2015. Before cofounding cluelesS, she exhibited her work both in France and internationally.

Saloméja Jacquet was born in 1994 in Paris. In 2017, she graduated from HEAD (Geneva) with a degree in fashion design. She worked with designers like Bless and Mariel Manuel before cofounding cluelesS.

Frieder Haller was born in 1987 in Freiburg im Breisgau. He was part of De Ateliers, a residency program in Amsterdam, from 2017 to 2019. He studied philosophy at the University of Leipzig from 2008 to 2011 and photography at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen from 2011 to 2016. In April 2023, he will present his first solo show at an art institution, the Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof in Hamburg. He is the cofounder of the independent art space New Bretagne/Belle in Essen. Since 2018, he has directed the artists’ space Root Canal in Amsterdam. In 2021, he cofounded the community center Cittipunkt in Berlin.

Fang Dong was born in 1991 in China. She lives and works in Bordeaux. Her name supposedly means “fragrant sense” in Chinese. These two characters are made up of ideograms referring to “square heavy herbs”; her other pseudonym is Heavy Herbe (h2e3). Somewhere between art and design, her pieces offer our senses a plurality of scales. It is a world that is tactile, sensory, and in perpetual motion.

Rafael Moreno was born in Colombia in 1993. They have lived and worked in Paris for seven years now. They studied at the Beaux-Arts de Paris and EHESS. Their work was recently shown in the June Art Fair (Switzerland), Treize (Paris), the Valeria Cetraro Gallery (Paris), Établissement d’en Face (Brussels), and the Gaudel de Stampa Gallery (Paris). Through installations, performances, and texts, Moreno offers fictional narratives on the relatiohship between the human body, technological developments, and current socio-economic contexts. They often work with found objects selected for their symbolism. Collage and manipulating these symbols allow Moreno to open and develop spaces for reflection that aim to deconstruct connections based on cultural domination.

-Marion Vasseur Raluy

Sticky Objects, 2023, exhibition view, Les Bains-Douches, Alençon

Fang Dong, Love Intestine #4m Long, 2023, Silk satin fabric, stretch satin, cotton satin, multicolor, climbing rope, programming pattern Between 420 and 800 cm

Sticky Objects, 2023, exhibition view, Les Bains-Douches, Alençon

cluelesS, Robe de chaise, 2023, Textile and plastic, variable dimensions

Rafael Moreno, kicks and jerks, 2023, ventilator, raw earth, agar agar, euro cents, metal wire, paper clip 40 x 30 x 20 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Gaudel de Stampa

Sticky Objects, 2023, exhibition view, Les Bains-Douches, Alençon

Fang Dong, Love Intestine #4m Long, 2023, Silk satin fabric, stretch satin, cotton satin, multicolor, climbing rope, programming pattern Between 420 and 800 cm

cluelesS, Lampe, 2023, textile and metal, variable dimensions

Rafael Moreno, kicks and jerks, 2023, 3D printing, arduino, soap dish, lamp, metal 100 x 160.40 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Gaudel de Stampa

cluelesS, Robe de chaise, 2023, Textile and plastic, variable dimensions

Hélène Carbonnel, Trash Talk, 2023, 7’40” stereo speaker installation