Text: David Britain
This month two of the most intensely visceral forces in electronic music will arrive in Paris to play live concerts, the Japanese composer and mathematician Ryoji Ikeda and the English electronica duo Autechre. Ryoji Ikeda’s music is the epitome of a technological and scientific marriage with art. His concerts and installations often feel more like complex scientific experiments with the audience’s senses than artistic events, as we’ve known them before. Ikeda is no stranger to Paris, having displayed his sound and light installation Spectra for the Nuit Blanche in 2024.
This time he will be performing an audiovisual concert called
Datamatics. His tools are the mathematically pure sine waves, white noise, square wave clicks, and binary data of computers. His instruments are specially designed speakers that can output frequencies well below and above the sensitivity of human ears. These are sounds your body perceives in the head and chest rather than ears. His music also utilises astonishingly complex mathematically created rhythms, which are usually delivered at speeds whereby your brain will have to work hard to keep up. After all, this is the work of a man fascinated by the thresholds of human perception to audio and visual data. Be prepared for a strong physical and above all visceral experience.
More on: Electronic extremity: Ryoji Ikeda and Autechre live
Text: Brendan Seibel
Well-heeled Parisians traversing flooded boulevards seem more the product of Luis Buñuel than of nature. This astonishing exhibition, presented on the centennial anniversary of The Great Flood of 1910, represents a surreal period when poor weather and rapidly melting snowpack contributed to a swollen Seine bursting its banks.
Collecting documents, photographs, paintings and memorabilia from a variety of archives and museums, Paris inondé 1910 is an immersive journey through the winter inundation. Expertly plotted and arranged the exhibition combines easily digested facts (in French) with documentary evidence. Beginning with the conditions which lead to the Seine's explosion, the journey guides you through the breaching of the quais, alongside the citizenry coping with disaster, and into the massive restoration efforts after the river receded.
More on: Paris Inondé 1910
Text and images: Sarah Braasch
Rayhana, a French-Algerian playwright and actress, was attacked last week in front of the theater in Paris where she is performing her provocative play, “At My Age, I Still Hide My Smoking”. Rayhana speaks out against Islamism and obscurantism and the Muslim culture of female oppression in Algeria. Her play takes place in a hammam in Algeria and portrays nine women sitting together and discussing their daily lives. The two men who attacked Rayhana grabbed her from behind, forcing her to the ground, and poured gasoline over her head and in her face, momentarily blinding her, and then attempted to set her on fire by throwing a lit cigarette on top of her head. Prior to this incident, Rayhana had been harassed verbally. Despite the attack and the threats of violence, Rayhana is determined to continue performing her play. She has received many offers to stage performances from theaters throughout France, in response to this outrageous criminal act.
More on: Ni Putes Ni Soumises Organizes a Protest for Rayhana
Text: Joanna Bronowicka
This year the ceremony of the Prix Lumière, which took place at
Hotel de Ville on January 15, 2024, celebrated French cinema for its
ardent engagement in current political and social issues. The award for
best film went to Welcome, a film by Philippe Lioret about a young
Kurdish boy who tries to swim across the Channel to join his
sweetheart in London. The release of Welcome put spotlight on the
plight of refugees from Iraq and Afghanistan waiting in Calais to cross
illegally to Great Britain. The film stirred a lively political debate
and led to a creation of a shelter for unaccompanied minors from
Afghanistan in Paris.
More on: Prix Lumière 2024 Celebrate Engaged French Cinema
Text: Tiffany Tang
By tracing the origin of Art Nouveau in Paris and explaining how the movement developed and spread across the continent, the “Art Nouveau Revival” exhibition in Musée d’Orsay displays a collection of works that best epitomize the different phases of the movement.
The Art Nouveau movement started at the turn of the nineteenth century, but it was met with decades of rejection until the 1960s. The original movement was a reaction against historicism and traditional art in favor of a new style and form that adapted itself to modern life, blurring of boundaries between fine arts and applied arts, and combining the new aesthetics with functionalism. The new aesthetics were characterized by the use of organic floral styles and curved lines as ornamentation in furniture, jewelry and tableware. Originally termed in Paris as “new art,” Art Nouveau took on different names as its influence spread across Europe and to the United States: Jugendstil in Germany, Stile Liberty or Stile Floreale in Italy, Modernismo in Spain, and Nieuwe Kunst in Holland.
More on: Art Nouveau at Musée d'Orsay
Text and image: Joel Ma
In the 21st century everyone knows at least one graphic designer. They usually have a keen eye for visual metaphor, impeccable personal hygiene and may or may not wear slim rectangular, black plastic glasses. If the bookshop Artazart were a person, it would be your Graphic designer friend. Artazart stocks a staggering selection of books on photography, architecture, art, web design, graffiti, journals, magazines, children books, bags, cameras, art resources and anything of a stylish visual nature. It announces its presence on the banks of the Canal St Martin with a bright orange shop front, elegant font and warm lighting. It has been operating for the last ten years and has seen various incarnations including converted gallery to bookshop/gallery to bookshop with a comprehensive online store.
More on: Artazart Design Bookstore
Text: Fabien Lemercier, Cineuropa
Image: My Night at Maud's, Eric Rohmer
Reactions have been pouring in after the announcement that director Eric Rohmer died in Paris on Monday, aged 89. French president Nicolas Sarkozy paid tribute “to the talent and truthfulness of a great auteur". Meanwhile, Prime Minister François Fillon paid homage to a "filmmaker of subtlety (…) who has for a long time been a classic of French cinema" and Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand praised "an all-round man of film and, at the same time, a perfect embodiment of the great bygone literary tradition of analysts of the heart".
More on: Master Filmmaker Eric Rohmer Dies
Recent Comments