Collective fatigue
July 5th - September 5th, 2024
Mémoire de l'Avenir (MDA)/Humanities, Arts and Society (HAS)
Curators: Liwei XU, Margalit BERRIET
Fatigue is not simply an isolated personal feeling. Over the past decades, fatigue has become a subject of research as a social, cultural, and scientific issue. Curated during the year of the Paris Olympics 2024, this exhibition explored fatigue as a collective condition shaped by neoliberalism and bio politics.
The modern Olympic Games show humanity's aspiration to infinitely surpass its own physical and emotional limits. The idea of progress and performance was invented in sports from the 18th century on-wards. Since the second half of the 20th century, in a society where human performance is measured by work and excellency, everyone must face an overload and acceleration of doings for increased performance, resulting in constant physical fatigue.
The exhibition aims to show how seven contemporary artists from different backgrounds address the issue of fatigue in our societies and explore the limits of cognition, activities, sensations, and human conditions behind this collective fatigue. When discussing fatigue, perhaps we could look at familiar things with a new perspective, without falling into the mechanism.
The exhibition was accompanied by a transdisciplinary program that included a screening of Maria by the Sea by Uyghur filmmaker Tawfiq Nizamidin, examine political exhaustion. The program also featured a concert by a French and Chinese electronic musicians, a participatory workshop where the audience modelled tiredness using newspapers, and a lecture on fatigue and repetition in philosophical and psychoanalytic thought.
The artists:
HELOISE BONIN, PETER BRANDT, ANA ISABEL FREITAS, JIHYE JEON, GIOVANNA MAGRI, RONI BEN ARI, MARILENA PISCIELLA, IZUMI UEDA YUU.
Performance:
LI SIKAI, TIONA ANDRIANAIVOMANANJAONA, VINCENT LEFEBVRE, DORIAN COMPAGN.
Film:
TAWFIQ NIZAMIDIN
Lecture:
YANLIN LUO
Workshop:
Maëva Soudrille
