Steffani Jemison. Sensus Plenior 10/17/ /21/2018 PRESS KIT SATELLITE 10 TH EDITION. #SteffaniJemison

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1 Steffani Jemison Sensus Plenior 10/17/ /21/2018 PRESS KIT #SteffaniJemison SATELLITE 10 TH EDITION 1, PLACE DE LA CONCORDE, PARIS 8 e CONCORDE

2 Partners The exhibition is co-produced by the Jeu de Paume, the FNAGP and the CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux. The Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques and Plastiques contributes to producing works from the Satellite events programme. The Friends of CAPC contribute to the production of works in the Satellite programme. The Jeu de Paume is member of Tram and d.c.a, association française de développement des centres d art. With the support of the Cité internationale des Arts. Media partners artpress, paris-art.com, Souvenirs from Earth TV And also Exhibition at CAPC musée d art contemporain de Bordeaux from 09/07/2017 to 11/12/2017. The Jeu de Paume receives public funding from the Ministère de la Culture. It is supported by Neuflize OBC and the Manufacture Jaeger-LeCoultre, its principal partners. Cover: Steffani Jemison, Sensus Plenior, 2017, film set photography. Coproduction: Jeu de Paume, Paris, Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques and CAPC musée d art contemporain. Courtesy of the artist Steffani Jemison 2

3 Steffani Jemison Sensus Plenior 10/17/ /21/2018 Curator OSEI BONSU Contents SATELLITE 10 PROGRAMME CALENDAR AND BIOGRAPHY OF OSEI BONSU, CURATOR THE EXHIBITION BIOGRAPHY OF STEFFANI JEMISON AND EXHIBITION CATALOGUE PRESS VISUALS PRACTICAL INFO In relation with the exhibition, the Jeu de Paume produces video portraits for each of its exhibition. Video portraits present the exhibition thanks to interviews with curators and focuses on works. From 15 November 2017, the video portrait Steffani Jemison is available on the website of the Jeu de Paume. / section "ressources" 3

4 SATELLITE 10 PROGRAMME THE ECONOMY OF LIVING THINGS Presenting the work of four international artists The Economy of Living Things draws upon fields of visual art, archaeology, music and literature to reveal an alternative map of modern migrations. The exhibition is concerned with the constant flow of bodies and the movements of plants, animals, artefact and other cultural products found in everyday life. Composed as a series of four solo exhibitions, it takes as its point of departure the recording of lived experience and the state of human progress in the twenty-first century. It is through the lens of the present that artists frame their own subjectivity while considering the deepening relationships between memory and fiction, communities and civilisations, the dead and the living. The Economy of Living Things concerns the value of undocumented peoples, the flights of birds pushed by high winds, the pathways of dreams and the songs and stories of freedom. In a broadening geo-political landscape, we can observe the routes of traffic forcing the movements of people, goods and processes into phases of conflict and agitation. In this existing world of hegemonic borders and empires drawn by war, we can understand the need for places of worship and spaces of encounter in our common reality. To admit history is a fragile space is to listen to the little known personal stories that tear through imposed narratives. From here we begin an archaeology of time that renders visible things unseen; an alternative territory; a transnational imagination. In a series of newly commissioned works, lens-based media is used to re-enliven events of histories rooted in personal, political and collective experience. Together the artists share an interest in the living histories of the communities and cultures to which they belong, capturing those intangible and immaterial expressions of life and livelihood. Beyond defining comprehensive narrative structures, spaces are often left open only to be filled by the emptiness of words, gestures and encounters. Entering these worlds we often find that we are awoken to the clamour of our own reality, the lives of unknown others, erasures and displacements, the pains of exile and the loss of traditions. While being rooted in the medium of film, The Economy of Living Things will take on an interdisciplinary program inviting performative and site-specific encounters with the moving image. By accommodating the complexity of contemporary practice, the framework will be an essential entry point to a breadth of interests from ethnomusicology and archaeological systems to colonial discourses and utopian conceptions of racial progress. Opening with Ali Cherri and closing with Jumana Manna, Satellites 10 will is oriented towards the tradition and preservation of histories as containers of living memory. Such encounters will open the space for the elaboration of temporality by Steffani Jemison and Oscar Murillo whose formal practices emphasize the poetics of physical gestures informed by wider socio-economic conditions such as industrial factories, urban high-streets and public parks. Moving beyond the notion of physically mapping history, The Economy of Living Things moves toward a consideration of the political body s movement through material, local, and symbolic time and the impossibility of controlling living things. Osei Bonsu Exhibition curator 4

5 THE CALENDAR ALI CHERRI / 14 february 28 may, 2017 Jeu de Paume, Paris OSCAR MURILLO / 13 june 24 september, 2017 Jeu de Paume, Paris STEFFANI JEMISON / 17 october, january 2018 Jeu de Paume, Paris JUMANA MANNA, with Ali Cherri, Oscar Murillo, Steffani Jemison / 30 november, february, 2018 Maison d'art Bernard Anthonioz, Nogent-sur-Marne BIOGRAPHY OSEI BONSU, CURATOR Osei Bonsu is a British-Ghanaian independent curator and writer based in London. His writing has been included in a number of museum and exhibition catalogues including the 56th Venice Biennial Exhibition and Milan EXPO «Arts and Food» at La Triennale di Milano. He is the founding director of CRANE, and has developed a number of projects focused on international art, including «Pangea II: New Art from Africa and Latin America» (Saatchi Gallery, 2015) and 1-54 Art Fair ( ). He advises private and notfor-profit arts organizations and contributes to publications such as New African, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Mousse Magazine, and Art Review among others Osei Bonsu. 5

6 THE EXHIBITION SENSUS PLENIOR The work of New York-based artist Steffani Jemison is rooted in research and combines time-based media and discursive platforms to examine African-American culture. Exploring the limitations of language, Jemison s work resists the logic of conventional storytelling to expose the entanglements of time, history and progress. Her new commission Sensus Plenior [Latin for Fuller Meaning ] considers the relationship between language, gesture and song in black gospel mime, focusing on the work and ideas of ordained minister Susan Webb and the Master Mime Ministry of Harlem. Through their elaborate and ecstatic choreography, gospel mime performers draw on dual genealogies that can be traced both to the revolutionary mime artist Marcel Marceau and West African dance traditions. In her videos, Jemison complicates the boundaries of performance and cinema, allowing the audience to become suspended outside structures of linear time and controlled meaning. In the black-and-white video, Susan Webb (the performer) is made visible as she goes through the motions of performing a routine punctuated by moments of pause, stillness, conversation and laughter. Influenced by Jemison s interest in silent cinema, the video opens a new line of enquiry into mime as a space that unveiled the performance of the self and the limits of speech at the turn of the twentieth century. During the period of rapid modernisation and shifting aesthetic hierarchies, cinema and pantomime were described as silent art forms sharing specific characteristics. Jemison favours a single-shot, single-take approach, often using the elaborate tropes of repetition, movement, improvisation and entropy found in early cinema. The relationship between the restrained visual narrative and the excessive physical movements of the protagonists opens up a space of ordering and disordering time, an allegory of political progress. Sensus Plenior is accompanied by an unnerving soundtrack of rhythmic strings, improvised by Mazz Swift (violin) and Brandon Lopez (upright bass) and arranged by Jemison, that disrupts the narrative order. The musicians interpreted the video sequences of pantomimed gestures, allowing for a unique dialogue between separate artistic lexicons, textures and performances. By the close of the video, Webb appears transformed in full-costume; her facial expressions are amplified by the make up, her movements elevated by their social context. Sensus Plenior centres on the black body s movement through time and space, and its strangeness is suspended between the balance of distance and intimacy. Resisting the psychologically developed character of modern cinema, the performer reserves the freedom to behave unpredictably, thus drawing attention to the distinction between black private life and black public life. Jemison s work is rooted in a black radical tradition that engages philosophical questions of deconstruction and improvisation as the core tenets of what scholar and poet Fred Moten has called a new Enlightenment. Shifting beyond the notion of blackness as a space of mere representation, her work explores ideas concerning the movement of the body in social time and space. In the context of the exhibition The Economy of Living Things and the network of interconnected actions defining the timeless globalised world, Jemison s work makes clear the impossibility of politics without movement. Centring on black bodies, her subjects emerge at the interaction of upheaval and interruption, revealing the boundless potential of gesture in relation to historical progress. This emphasis on the universality of language as it relates to diverse communities and social spaces aligns the work with the practices of creolisation and the right to opacity. By forcing open the limitations of language, Jemison s work continues to explore otherness as specific conditions of our contemporary and historical realities. Osei Bonsu 6

7 BIOGRAPHY STEFFANI JEMISON Steffani Jemison Brad Ogbonna, courtesy of the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Steffani Jemison was born in Berkeley, California, and is currently based in Brooklyn, New York. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2009) and a BA in Comparative Literature from Columbia University (2003). She has participated in artist residencies at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn; the International Studio and Curatorial Program, Brooklyn; Project Row Houses, Houston; the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In 2015, she presented her new multipart commission Promise Machine at the Museum of Modern Art. Jemison s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Brooklyn Museum; the Drawing Center; LAXART; the New Museum; the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Laurel Gitlen; Team Gallery; and other venues. PUBLICATION Steffani Jemison. Sensus Plenior. Texts by Osei Bonsu and Steffani Jemison, conversation with Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts and Steffani Jemison Published: october 2017 / cm, 64 pages French / English / Conception: Villa Böhnke Co-edition: Jeu de Paume / CAPC musée d art contemporain de Bordeaux / Maison d Art Bernard Anthonioz ISBN: / Price: 14 / Diffusion-distribution: Les presses du réel Digital Version / ISBN: / Price: 6,99 7

8 PRESS VISUALS The copyright-free reproduction and display of the following selection of images is permitted solely as part of the promotion of this exhibition at the Jeu de Paume and only while the exhibition is in progress Steffani Jemison, Sensus Plenior, 2017, film set photography. Co-production: Jeu de Paume, Paris, Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques and CAPC musée d art contemporain. Courtesy of the artist Steffani Jemison Press visuals to download on ID : presskit Password : photos

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10 6. 7. Steffani Jemison, Master Mime Ministry of Harlem, 2017, research photograph. Courtesy of the artist Steffani Jemison Steffani Jemison, Steffani Jemison, Eyes, Minds, Man, Thoughts, Novelties, Documentaries, Mountains, World, Demon, Diseases, High, Up, Anointing, Research drawings. Courtesy of the artist Steffani Jemison 8. 10

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12 PRACTICAL INFOS #SteffaniJemison OPENING HOURS Tuesday (late-night opening): 11 am - 9 pm Wednesday to Sunday: 11 am - 7 pm Closed Monday, 25 th of December and 1 st of January ADMISSION Satellite Programme: free entrance PRESS VISUALS Copyright-free press visuals can be downloaded from login: presskit - password: photos CONTACTS Press: Annabelle Floriant T. +33(0) I +33(0) I annabellefloriant@jeudepaume.org Communication: Anne Racine T. +33(0) I anneracine@jeudepaume.org Discover the Café HANA BENTO Japanese Cuisine in the Jeu de Paume VISIT + BENTO with a healthy lunchtime menu of traditional Japanese dishes. TEA MENU authentic Japanese sweets and teas Hana Bento Japanese Cuisine Jeu de Paume, photo Adrien Chevrot BRUNCH Saturday and sunday from 11 am 4 pm LATE-NIGHT OPENING Tuesday 11 am 9 pm 1, PLACE DE LA CONCORDE, PARIS 8 e CONCORDE