Connexion Grants : the laureates Eternal Network and La Ferme du Buisson
The annual Connexion grants financially support French venues to carry out an international co-production project or the resumption abroad of exhibitions of artists from the French scene. The first two winners have been announced.
The organization of the exhibition abroad remains a complex and expensive operation, and many of French venues have few means to develop these projects.
To contribute to increase and develop the influence of French artists on the international scene, ADAGP creates a new grant, Connexion, for French public and private venues (museums, art centers, FRAC, artist-run spaces ...), which organize exhibitions of artists from the French scene in all disciplines of the visual arts, co-produced or toured with one or more foreign venues.
The jury composed of artists Hervé Di Rosa, Eva Jospin, Gaël Charbau (art critic and curator), Philippe Regnier (Editorial Director of THE ART NEWSPAPER), Valerie Vesque Jeancard (Honorary General Director of Rmn-GP) and Béatrice Salmon (Deputy Director for the Visual Arts at the Ministry of Culture) awarded two grants worth 30,000 euros each to:
Eternal Network will present the "Some of Us" exhibition in Nordart, Kunstwerk Carlshütte (Germany) with the ambition to exhibit to 200 artists from the French women's scene of the last 20 years. The particularity of this project is to approach the artistic production by the prism of the gender and to highlight the contribution of the women in the contemporary French creation.
Some of us is conceived as a panorama of emerging artists in the last twenty years. This generation is special in being defined by two sociological groups, which are sometimes opposed; that is to say, of the half of the generation X and that of the beginning of the generation Y (artists born between 1968 and 1993). These two generations have an essential common point determined by the definitive rise of the place of the woman on the job market and parallel of the place of artists women in the world art. This exhibition will try to identify all the actresses of this generation, specifically in France, and to draw up an "exhaustive" panorama.
La Ferme du Buisson will have the opportunity to exhibit "The economy of the apostrophes" of Béatrice Balcou in Belgium. Thanks to the Connexion grant, this French multidisciplinary artist will be welcomed at the M-Museum in Leuven (Belgium).
For this first wide-ranging exhibition, Béatrice Balcou offers a sensitive study about the importance of discretion, care and meditation.
Throughout performances, sculptures, drawings and installations, Béatrice Balcou creates esthetic experiences, both sensorial and emotional, in which she invents new exhibition rites. She engineers interconnections between art, work and rest, blurring the conventional distinctions between production, distribution and consumption.
For this artist, the artwork is not an ephemeral picture you may identify or quickly look at, but a physical materiality you must care and enjoy collectively. People’s perception and experience is crucial in her work.
For this quasi retrospective, she articulates old, recent and current works, honoring assistantship and cooperation. She also invites to pace in the exhibition like in a landscape. Various connections appear along this path, resulting from the placebo sculpture arrangements, the movies, the original drawings, the interactive artworks and the guide narratives.
About Eternal Network
Victoire Dubruel and Anastassia Makridou-Bretonneau founded the association Eternal Network in Tours in 1999.
In 2012, Eternal Network opened an exhibition space in one of the tool pavilion of the Choiseul place, in Tours.
Guest artists realize interventions in situ or show artworks deeply related with the geography, the culture or the history of the place.
The program, unmistakably eclectic, is open to artistic approaches, experiences and researches interested in the present-day world and our interactions with it. Relying on Eternal Network philosophy – talk equally to insiders and outsiders – Eternal Gallery allows artists to play an inside/outside game thanks to performances and installations.
About the Ferme du Buisson
The Ferme du Buisson actively support creation since 1991. Focusing on French emergent artists or foreign artists underrepresented in France, the contemporary art center is specialized in exhibitions showing performances, multidisciplinary works and experimentations.
Under the direction of Julie Pellegrin, the program makes contemporary art interact with other artistic fields (especially theater and dance) or social sciences.
Conceiving the artistic scene as part of the social, political and cultural sphere, it mixes monographic and collective exhibitions, publications, meeting and performances. This prospective programming relies on a performative conception of the art, celebrating process and experimentation.
About ADAGP
Created by artists in 1953, ADAGP is the first French royalty collecting and distribution society in the field of graphic and visual arts. It represents 170,000 authors worldwide, in all disciplines of visual art, including painting, sculpture, photography, design, graphic novels, street art, video art, digital art, architecture and more... At the heart of an international network of 50 partner organizations, the ADAGP collects and distributes royalties, protects artists and fights to improve authors’ rights. Through its program of cultural action, ADAGP encourages the creative scene by initiating and / or financially supporting projects that enhance the visual arts and promote them nationally and internationally.