Perdre aussi nous appartient [Losing Is Also Still Ours]

We are pleased to present the group exhibition Losing Is Also Still Ours [Perdre aussi nous appartient] with works by Daniel Blaufuks, Raphaël Dallaporta, JH Engström, Capucine Gros, Mishka Henner, David Horvitz, Alfredo Jaar, Ethan Levitas, Daido Moriyama, Hanako Murakami, Anders Petersen, Stéphanie Solinas, and Daisuke Yokota. The exhibition is held in both Odéon and Vaugirard spaces.


This exhibition is an attempt to align with the subtlety of poet Rainer Maria Rilke?s (1875-1926) words: "Losing is also still ours" (letter to Hans Carossa, 7 February 1924). Something is always lost, and this very loss is precious.

Each of the works in the exhibition is, as Alfredo Jaar likes to formulate, an "exercise in representation". Representations of the world, of intimacy, of suffering, of violence, of pleasure, of silence and noise. In doing so, none of the works in this exhibition dictate what is to be seen. The challenge of Losing Is Also Still Ours is to present clearly how all representation retains an irreducible and precious opacity.

If opacity is a metaphor for the gap between the idea and its realisation, or between the realities of each individual, it offers a place for the viewer's imagination. Imagining horror, draught, a historical event or mythical place, or a latent image that will never appear. An olfactory link, Hanako Murakami's Air de l'image [Air of the Image] (2022), a perfume that reiterates the smell that filled the studio of Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833), one of the inventors of the modern image, is diffused in both spaces.

This exhibition is an attempt whose nature summons a title that can resist us. And if you are still reading this text, it is likely that Rilke's words, "Losing is also still ours", have already escaped you and will probably again. This exhibition is an attempt to sum up several years of exchange with artists who break down established meanings and make the world possible. At a time when immediacy and transparency are being advocated, this exhibition is also, but not exclusively, a commentary on photography, the illusion of the index, the obsession with recording and the importance of interstices.


(Jean-Kenta Gauthier, January 2023)