Sibyl Sybil

Dears Sophie and Marion,

I keep erasing what I’ve recorded and starting over, not even listening to it, just erasing it and starting over. I can’t find a way to describe the show or the works. Something sticks when I try to bring them into language in that way, from that direction. I’d rather tell you about something else, the title, for example. The Sibyl is a figure from Greek mythology. The Sibyil is an oracle. Her home has “a hundred openings, a hundred mouths.” She writes her predictions on oak tree leaves, dispersed to the winds. When I looked up the spelling of her name, I found that there were two, and that the other referred to a book and a film from the 70s that you may have seen. I wanted to hang the show on a name like you would a coat on a coathhook. I wanted the name to be that of a figure and the figure that came to mind was the Sibyl, of which there is not one but many. I could describe the works. I could tell you that there will be a video, images, objects, but also marks or traces on the walls or the floors or the doors even. And that I’ll also be showing collections, collections of things that I come across, that I end up with, and that end up in my studio and come to play a role in my thinking. But I’d rather talk a bit more about the Sibyl. I like the idea of a text that’s received. I like the idea of a text that’s communicated in dispersed fragments. There is a passivity to what we call the creative process. A receptivity that allows one to receive or encounter whatever it is that an idea is. A blind thing, fumbling for its form.

Julien Bismuth, May 2017

The curator is for this exhibition is Sophie Kaplan.

Most of the works have been produced by La Criée centre for contemporary art in Rennes.

Meeting

Julien Bimuth

Saturday, June 24, 2017 at 3 pm

Célia Houdart, Le Scribe et un sphinx / The Scribe is a sphinx

the futuristic short story by Célia Houdart about the cycle, While I was also listening [...]