M Year Zero

The inaugural exhibition of the Rosa Brux collective art venue is devoted to the French artist Marie Reinert and the impossible connection generated by the adaptation of her work to the format of the monographic catalogue. The chance to rethink what in a performative practice like Reinert’s immediately renders the question of her archive problematic. The immersion she undertakes in each of her interventions, the compromises, and the infiltrations that fully take part in her practice and amount to so many ways of working her way into the interstices of the current order and power – once they have been transcribed into the form of an archive, these remain in a blind spot, hidden by the object that has been produced, the tool or the work of art.

This is the reason why Marie Reinert, who is little inclined normally to let herself be politely taken over by preexisting forms or fashions, decided to free herself of the traditional configurations of the monograph. She proposes playing out the story of her past works in an improvised performance / interview with the curator and art critic Marie Frampier in a scene made up of tools referencing in part her past infiltrations. A script that is on hand during the performance, “borrowed” for the occasion from a public company, will meticulously document and archive live the flow of the discussion. That discussion will soon be published in book form.

Currently monographs propose establishing the corpus of an artist, a process that amounts to abandoning it to posterity in a reasonable way. Here Marie Reinert seeks to elude, foil, outsmart its mechanisms as well as the horizons of the audience’s expectations, never fearing to lose that audience with a parenthetical remark or a historical dispute. The awkward or hesitant elements that are ordinarily eliminated in a rereading, the side issues, the blanks drawn, the digressions, and other repetitions will build the flow of a catalogue that is performed, inhabited, and vitalizing!