Penser le Présent with Julien Creuzet and Céline Kopp

Julien Creuzet, artist and studio head at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, talks to Céline Kopp, co-curator of the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2024, about his creation.

‘What does the centre mean when you're French? What does the French Pavilion in Venice and national representation mean? How can we rethink all this, while being designated as ‘ultramarine’, with the feeling of belonging to a much more complex French history? I think we need to try and shed some light on it. It's important to physically and symbolically move people into a reality that is largely beyond the reach of cultural institutions and policies. It's undoubtedly utopian, but perhaps it can help to change certain perspectives in the future. Julien Creuzet

These are just some of the questions that the artist and the curator will be tackling during this evening, in which the voice and oral tradition, which accompany Julien Creuzet's work, play a central role.

The meeting will be followed by a signing of the exhibition catalogue, Attila cataracte ta source aux pieds des pitons verts finira dans la grande mer gouffre bleu nous nous noyâmes dans les larmes marées de la lune nos mots cyclone, published by Beaux-Arts de Paris. This exceptional work brings together a rich corpus of literary excerpts (poems, fiction, science fiction, critical essays, film scripts) in the spirit of shared references between the African diasporas and Julien Creuzet's work.

Julien Creuzet is a Franco-Caribbean artist, born in 1986, who lives and works in Montreuil. He creates protean works that incorporate poetry, music, sculpture, assemblage, film and animation. By evoking transoceanic post-colonial exchanges and their multiple temporalities, the artist places his past, present and future heritage at the heart of his production. Shunning global narratives and cultural reductionism, Julien Creuzet's work often highlights anachronisms and social realities to construct irreducible objects. Like relics of the future brought ashore by an ocean tide, his works materialise as amplified testimonies to history, technology, geography and the self.

He has taken part in numerous institutional group exhibitions, including: Performa Biennial 2023 (US), 35th São Paulo Biennial (BR) and 12th Liverpool Biennial (UK), all three in 2023; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (US) and Museum Tinguely, Basel (CH) in 2022; National Gallery Prague (CZ) in 2022.

Julien Creuzet's work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including at Magasin CNAC, Grenoble; Camden Art Center, London (UK) in 2021; Palais de Tokyo, Paris and CAN Centre d'Art Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel in 2019; Fondation d'Entreprise Ricard, Paris and Bétonsalon, Paris, in 2018.

Céline Kopp has been director of Magasin, the national centre for contemporary art in Grenoble, since 2022. From 2012 to 2022, she was director of Triangle-Astérides, a contemporary art centre of national interest in Marseille, where she developed exhibition projects with Liz Magor, the Chicano artists' group Asco, Paul Maheke, Jesse Darling, Lydia Ourahmane and Dominique White. Committed to the practice of artist residency, she is interested in the ethics of mobility and the local and transnational strategies employed by art spaces and artists outside market centres. Previously, she was curator at the MCA Chicago, co-curator of the 6th edition of the Ateliers de Rennes, Biennale d'art contemporain, and has conceived numerous projects in France and internationally, notably at Powerhouse, Memphis, and SixtyEight Art Institute, Copenhagen. She is currently a board member of d.c.a - Association française de développement des centres d'art contemporain.