Featured Event | Lives in Transit

Lives in transit installation view at Jeu de Paume, Paris. 
Photo by Romain Darnaud

The renowned Albanian artist Adrian Paci comes to international audiences with his newest work The Column, in view at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris through May 12, 2013.

The Column | [La Colonne] 2013

© Adrian Paci 2013 

" Long pursued, this work produced the column that opens the exhibition and a cinematographic-quality video that ends it. The work narrates the story of a block of marble extracted from a Chinese quarry, loaded onto a cargo ship and worked on board until it became a column. The ship's destination is not known but, with its Corinthian capital, the piece evokes the classical culture and Europe.

In The Column, the image of a ship sailing the sea and from which the raw material emerges transformed into a precious artefact is linked to the fantastic imagery of the journey. It also makes reference to the expanded economic strategies of today's society, trade and the dramatic reality of factory-ships, the meaning of work and the value of the classical culture, depicted in one of its greatest symbols, the column. Despite the spare images, the surrounding circumstances are not obliterated from the work as Paci retrieves them in the precision of his gaze, the definition of the details, the intense close-ups and the snapshots of daily life captured on board the ship. Yet, this sea voyage assumes an epic nature and the image of the sun's rays caressing the column at the end of the video sanctions its symbolic dimension."  (domus)

Lives in transit installation view at Jeu de Paume, Paris.
Photo by Romain Darnaud

The exhibition is a collection of the artist's diverse body of work (videos, installations, paintings, photographs and sculptures).

" The fact of being at a crossroads, at the frontier of two separate identities, underlies all my work on film.” (Adrian Paci)

Gradually, Adrian Paci has distanced himself from his personal experience to treat collective history, in projects that put the emphasis on the consequences of conflicts and social revolutions, revealing how identity is conditioned by the socio-economic context. Working with non-professional actors, men and women in difficulty, he explores many of the existential and social problems of our epoch: migration, mobility, loss, displacement, globalization, cultural identity, nostalgia, memory..." (jeudepaume)

********************************************************************************