FRIBOURG.- On one side art and on the other alienation. Groups of works by eight artists are separated by walls that divide Friart’s industrial space into cells. From one passage to the next, the architecture produces a feeling of isola- tion. But it also allows the works to be freed by refusing to establish a principle of equivalence between them. By giving each space its own time, the sequences are not imposed but left to the visitors to consider them- selves.

Differing from the pressure imposed on them by the social industry in which they operate, the works are not new. Often operating in series, their appearance is closer to the variant or the edit. A narrative pover- ty emerges from the self-sufficiency of their material presence. Far from the discursive charm of the signi- fier, they do not “say” anything, and do not illustrate any particular fact. Their exhibition only repeats the contradictions of art under capitalism.

Each ensemble has its own rules. But all share the fact of being determined by art as work in a capitalist context. In this dual existence, they are caught between the singularity of creation and the universality of com- modities. Refusing to facilitate the transition from one to the other, they make strategic use of abstraction. In a dead end of aesthetic thought, this becomes a tool to affirm the ideological links between the unrepresen- table totality of capital and the model subjectivity of the artist.

Trapped in the pleasure of the sign, the biographical finds itself alienated through its retroactive and moral production. As if settling the score with economic rea- son, the subject—now turned into content—appears closer to error, oblivion, and madness.

In modernity, the relationship between art and aliena- tion has been, generation after generation, one of the interpretative keys to art. By starting from this genera- lity, the exhibition raises the question of its relevance today. The affirmation of a common space, or of the “we” of the exhibition, is the place which allows it to evoke the contradictions between art and work. This work of the negative is a solitary pleasure. But by conti- nuing to integrate the impasse into form, it draws a ho- rizon for the recognition of fragmented and yet eman- cipated subjectivities.

ABOUT THE WORKS

« ...in this much-travelled labyrinth, like an enigma that we had to solve...»
Guy Debord, On the passage of a few people during a certain unit of time, 1959

DELPHINE MOULY’s film, Extended Play, is still a work in progress. Its length can neither be apprehended by means of perception, nor consumed in its entirety. At each stage it undergoes a new exhibited version. With a camera mounted in her vehicle, the artist uses the interior to frame long tracking shots that recount her journeys. Images and sound are subject to the vaga- ries of traffic and the editing choices made available by real-time driving. In Extended Play (Tunnel Tunnel Edit), digital radio, voice and motors energise the en- dless depth of road infrastructure that conditions the exchange of goods and services.

Client and Material III were presented by MORAG KEIL in an exhibition entitled Artificial Intelligence in 2024. Sculptural elements subvert the ideology of contempo- rary work. Near the boarded-up windows, the artist’s outdated website mocks the fantasy of digital acces- sibility. A truncated mannequin represents excellence in the profession. Two sinks are balanced on trays, borrowing, as attributes, the symbolism of a statue of justice, making the figure an allegory of equality in economic exchange. The encounter between business hygiene and bathroom hygiene is frozen in an objecti- vity that denies abjection. In this corporate setting, two 3D prints serve as emblems of the manual and com- puter work of a company that superimposes layers of progress to continue investing and shaping the world in its image.

MAURO CERQUEIRA’s works are part of a particu- lar production context that has marked about fifteen years of the artist’s work: the gentrification of the city of Porto and its downtown where he occupied a studio and co-managed an art space (A Certain Lack of Cohe- rence, 2008-2025). The Casas num Beco Malcheiroso (« Houses in a Stinking Alley») constitute the terminal stage of this concern regarding real estate specula- tion. The artist reinscribes a reality made of electronic waste, cheap jewellery, and other signs of economic disparity on developer billboards. By combining it with a video that highlights the dilapidated state of Porto’s housing in 2012, his installation brings this long artistic cycle full circle.

JIMMIE DURHAM’s four pencil drawings were recently found in a crate stored in the Friart depot. They were made by the artist for his exhibition at the Kunsthalle in 1993. Borrowing the form of letters addressed to the people of Fribourg, the drawings play on the fantasy of otherness by humorously turning it on its head. A fic- tional author’s language errors ask who is who’s other. The handwritten traits tend towards images, invoking the mimetic origin of language and the ideological content of this thesis.

RICHARD SIDES’ monochromatic paintings have recent- ly surfaced in his work. Covering old collages with a thick layer of colour, the artist preserves the reliefs and titles from the originals that refer to absent cultural or political images. This obliteration by abstraction refe- rences modernist history that was long commercialised as a sign of taste by the predominant design culture. Once hung, the painted objects point to the anaes- thetic power of the ambience or play on screen rela- tionships between ideology and the unconscious. This work extends a practice of montage in which sound, language and image collide from a number of sources equating to a bad infinity. The video If you never take it seriously you never get hurt (2025) links the a-signifying realism of everyday life with popular and situationist re- ferences in a sublime, trippy sensory experience of the endless. The soundtrack takes advantage of the atten- tion drawn by the image to subtly implant its insidious melody in the mind.

Created for the exhibition, ETHAN ASSOULINE’s instal- lation evokes a book under construction whose pages are spread out in a frieze displayed in an enclosed area. Crude interventions, as if signs of manual work, damage materials and the industrial images. In some scenes, photos of his own skull play with the idea of an alienated perspective. Like someone attempting to see themselves from behind to verify their existence in an architecture of conditioning and behavioural modu- lation. The psychogeographic dérive on the terrains of the new Paris are transformed into a psychopathologi- cal analysis of urbanism.

Politics by HANNAH BLACK is part of a series of videos in which the artist explores the interview format. These are notably conducted with political activists involved in the recent uprisings in the United States. In the frontal nature of their message, the LEDs that accompany the film reduce the militant content to a generality. Through its motivational insistence, the rhetorical abstraction of language takes precedence over the concrete. As a whole, the work shows a place of a conflict. It forces us to think about the boundaries between the symbolic institutional dimension of politics and commitment in the real.

MILENA LANGER’s approach updates the problema- tic of structural cinema by focusing on the uses and norms of the contemporary filmed image. Her installa- tion superimposes a low-intensity light projection onto non-functional flat screens, which the artist has kept only the surface of. Once dismantled and reassembled on frames, the consistency of the screens is put to the test. Surfaces regain a material life beyond the image. Liquidation, the projection, consists of a montage of images filmed under the counter in an audiovisual store. It closes the filming and distribution consump- tion cycle on itself.