Tour de France des Frac : Frac Sud - Cité de l'Art Contemporain
A double anniversary for the Frac Sud – Cité de l’Art Contemporain
For this fourth stage of the Tour de France des Frac, we stop at Frac Sud – Cité de l’Art Contemporain. While the Fracs are celebrating their 40th anniversary this year, 2023 is shaping up to be an exceptional year for the Frac Sud, marked by an extremely rich anniversary program, both inside and outside the walls of the regional territory. The projects imagined by the Frac within this framework have the ambition of highlighting the missions and know-how of this creative and awareness-raising structure acting for artists and audiences. They also allow the Frac to project itself into a new development dynamic for the next ten years by repositioning a certain number of structural issues specific to these institutions.
Creating society: a challenge at the heart of the Frac’s project
Societal issues are at the heart of the Frac’s artistic and cultural project.
The artists, through their interventionist or even activist strategies, through their so-called socially engaged practices, through their tense dialogue with the human and social sciences, work through their projects to displace and pose differently the questions related to the public thing (Res-publica). Through their works, they are interested in various fields such as urbanism, sustainable development, ecology or the social segregation of spaces. These artistic practices in the city, push us to rethink the aesthetics and the relationship to politics, opening the way to speculations which imagine again the space, the environment, the social link, and “what makes society”.
Highlights of 2023 not to be missed
Exhibition Hamish Fulton, A walking Artist
From March 25 to October 29, 2023
Curator: Muriel Enjalran, director of Frac Sud – Cité de l’Art Contemporain
In partnership with the Cairn Centre d’art, Digne-les-Bains
With the support of the British Council and Fluxus Art Projects
The Frac is opening its fortieth anniversary with an exhibition devoted to a major artist on the international art scene, which is fully in line with the cultural and artistic project ‘Faire société’. Hamish Fulton – a walking artist – has been developing a committed body of work for nearly fifty years, in line with the major environmental issues and challenges facing our societies today.
Since the beginning of the 1970s, this British artist has travelled the world on foot. He has made several hundred walks over thousands of kilometers, which alone constitute the whole of his work. These solitary artistic experiences integrate a diversity of practices that “attempt” to translate the experience of these walks: photographs, texts, photo texts, drawings, murals, artist’s books, public readings, etc. His work has been in numerous private and public collections and presented internationally for over forty years.
Hamish Fulton does not seek to transform nature but to show that it is nature that transforms you: walking is for him a militant, political act. In a humanist approach, his committed practice, which has been extended to collective walks, challenges us on our interdependence with nature and on our model of productivist society.
Exhibition Martha Wilson, Invisible
From July 1, 2023 to February 4, 2024
Curator: Muriel Enjalran, director of Frac Sud – Cité de l’Art Contemporain
The Frac is pleased to devote its first major monographic exhibition in France to Martha Wilson, a pioneering and influential figure in feminist engagement through art.
A singular figure in the history of American art since the early 1970s, Martha Wilson was one of the first artists to use her body, along with Hannah Wilke and Eleanor Antin, to question social representations of the feminine through her performances, videos and photographs. By modifying her physical appearance, she thus challenges the stereotypical identities of a neoliberal America. A precursor, her work points to territories later conquered by other contemporary artists, such as Cindy Sherman or Martha Rosler, or feminist philosophers like Judith Butler.
Exhibition Boris Charmatz
From December 9, 2023 to March 24, 2024
Curator: Muriel Enjalran, director of Frac Sud – Cité de l’Art Contemporain
The Frac invites this great international figure of contemporary dance to present a series of films tracing his choreographic research through emblematic dance pieces. For the occasion, the Frac will produce with the artist a new film on his latest creation, the whistled solo SOMNOLE (2021), which he will present as a preview.
This exhibition will invite the visitor in a body to body confrontation with the screens, to confront large living pictures that summon up both a history of contemporary dance and a history of art and painting. This is the first time that an art institution will devote an exhibition to the film work of this artist who has always been interested in contemporary art and has made incursions into it in the performative mode. Dance pieces will also be presented during the weekend in the Frac’s spaces with his company Terrain.
The Frac gets into sports with the Cultural Olympiad
The Frac Sud – Cité de l’Art Contemporain, as part of its new artistic and cultural project and in favor of the national and regional dynamics initiated by the hosting of the Olympic Games in Paris and Marseille, has made the relationship between art and sport an artistic axis structuring its programming inside and outside the walls for the next two years. It is also guiding the enrichment of its collection with the acquisition of works by artists who are more specifically interested in this issue. Art and sport have the power to transform, to bring people together, and play an active role in society. They question our relationship to the use of public space and the environment. The aesthetic experience, as well as the game and the sport, allow a step aside. They invite us to free ourselves from reality in order to better reappropriate it. Thus, the projects developed around the Cultural Olympiad take place in schools, colleges, high schools, cultural structures, media libraries, training centers, sports clubs, natural parks, etc.
As part of the Corps à l’œuvre project in partnership with the Lycée Victor Hugo in Carpentras, for example, an exhibition has been on display since January 11 and will be on display until May 9, 2023 at the school. With works by Albert Chubac, Bernard Descamps, André Fortino and Chourouk Hriech, the Frac and the high school are offering a first-year art history class the opportunity to take on the role of exhibition curators, echoing the issues developed in the framework of the Cultural Olympiad.
The importance of proximity and neighbourhood
The year 2023 is placed for the Frac in Marseille under the sign of proximity and neighborhood with many activities and projects aimed at the inhabitants of its neighborhood.
Parallel to a cycle of meetings with a singular address to its neighbors, the Frac drives the first Biennale de la Joliette with a collective of social, cultural and economic actors of the Euromed area, and with the inhabitants of the district to propose cross-disciplinary artistic and cultural events in the heart of its geographical area. The Biennale will be held from October 15 to 25, 2023, and will promote encounters and neighbourhood life, enhancing for Marseille audiences and beyond the tremendous effervescence of Joliette and the richness of its cultural heritage.
Frac Sud – Cité de l’Art Contemporain also develops Hors-Champ projects, which are art awareness projects for various audiences. Through outdoor work, art workshops, meetings and exchanges with artists, and performances, the Frac wishes to promote the support and expression of these audiences. The interest is therefore specifically focused on the Joliette district, through work in collaboration with local actors such as the Petitapeti association, the CIERES (Centre d’Innovation pour l’Emploi et le Reclassement Social) and the district’s residents’ committees.
The Frac Sud – Cité de l’Art Contemporain is developing a number of projects this year, including the discovery of works of art, workshops for children and families, and support for social centers. A project for the co-construction of original mediation tools will also be unveiled on March 24, 2023 between a group of students and a committee of residents of the Joliette neighborhood, and will invite the neighborhood to get to know the Frac better, to make use of the building that is open to the public and to become familiar with contemporary art.
Treasures of the collection
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Joan MITCHELL, -
Nancy GOLDIN, -
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Apichatpong Weerasetakul, Fireworks, 2014 © Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Interview with Muriel Enjalran
Director of the Frac Sud – Cité de l’Art Contemporain
“For 40 years, the Frac has contributed to raising awareness of contemporary art among generations of people through its assiduous work with schoolchildren and social workers in particular. It must be said that there is still much to be done to make its missions and actions known more widely to audiences that we call remote, which are not always audiences belonging to the most modest and disadvantaged segments of the population: one can be remote from art for many other reasons, including cultural ones. The Frac must therefore continue to innovate and be ever more inventive in the ways they reach other audiences.
In a dynamic of cultural transversality, the Frac Sud – Cité de l’Art Contemporain, through its project “Faire société”, wishes to raise awareness of sport and amateur sports practices. Thus, with the Olympic Games and the cultural Olympiad in mind, the Frac has made the relationship between art and sport a structuring axis of its artistic programming and the policy of enriching its collection. Thus, in 2023 and 2024, Frac Sud will build new artistic residency projects in its territory in training centers and sports clubs in order to encourage a real meeting of the artistic and sports fields and to allow their audiences to cross paths.
In 2024, it will work with other cultural actors on its territory to create a large, generous and lively “Olympic” thematic exhibition that will show the public in a delightful way what art brings to sport and sport to art. Sport participates in the construction of a common culture in the same way as art.