Ygrec

Taking an ordinary love story as a starting point, to Thomas unwraps multiple narratives of attachment, dependence, anger, and resistance. The exhibition is imagined as a message to a lover of the past, a certain Thomas, an autobiographical and fictional character who could be known by other names. Like the chapters of a strange romance novel, the works in the exhibition follow conversations between curators and artists in which each of them invests and transforms their own Thomas. The artists embrace the emotions and the political issues that condition and affect them. Each artist has worked with “their own Thomas”, making him emerge from their personal story in echo with the curators’ stories and emotions.

Between euphoria in love, mourning the loss, helplessness, anger, and rage, to Thomas is an ensemble of deeply intimate gestures. Often put aside — considered as too personal or too singular, too strong or too messy — yet emotions allow artists and curators to make their work shareable and accessible while exploring the complex visual and political regimes that determine them.

Invited by the Ecole nationale supérieure d’art de Paris Cergy (ENSAPC) for the event « Un été culturel en Île-de-France », the Franco-Moroccan artist Yto Barrada has installed an Arabocentric calendar of the lunar cycle on the facades of the ENSAPC. Each of the twenty-five phases of the moon visually highlights one of the craters named for Arab or Islamic scientists. The Moon’s surface is riddled with holes; these craters, most of them the imprints of long- forgotten asteroids. Also long-forgotten are the names of many of those who first discovered and studied them —along with empty spaces in the history of lunar conquest; and the telling holes in the legislation which relates to its occupation and exploitation. As often in her work, Yto Barrada develops here an interest in history and storytelling, and special forms of knowledge which constitute both.