ARTISTS TALKING

The installation of the Bad Beuys Entertainment at Carter Presents is the first project curated off-site by the Paris-based non-profit exhibition space Haptic. First set up in the well-known Marais, Haptic had to move out of its original space and temporarily settled in the Bastille area, hosted at La Maison Rouge, the foundation for contemporary art created by Antoine de Galbert. This generous invitation ended last September, encouraging Haptic to find other opportunities to pursue its curatorial project dedicated to young artists.

Bad Beuys Entertainment is an artists’ collective that was created by a group of students from the Beaux-Arts School in Cergy, at the outskirts of Paris. These artists built their work and collective identity within the culture they were evolving in, using its codes and social strategies to draw a challenging portrait of an often stereotyped environment and community.

The work shown is a sound installation composed of two main elements: two columns of samplers, amplifiers and loudspeakers playing Public Enemy’s hip hop interludes. The familiar rhythm and sounds are decomposed and repeated, transforming the musical phrase into a more minimal language. The lyrics at the core of hip hop music are here dissolved into a complex sound environment. The two piles of sound systems mimic the ad-hoc stack of objects one could see in the streets of Paris’s suburbs. Those two columns also evoke the social housing towers that have been the most iconic representation of the social development in France after the Second World War and of the controversial political questions at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Next to the sound installation, only one work hangs on the wall: a photograph titled les Sauvageons described by the Bad Beuys Entertainment as their fictional auto-portrait. Four white and middle-aged men dressed in branded sportswear are waiting at a bus stop, posing and re-presenting ironically the stereotypes already embedded in the viewer’s mind.