This new exhibition is inspired by Matti Braun’s interest in the complex cultural relationships between France, Germany, Senegal and Morocco from the colonial period up to the present, and represents a new step in the research that he began in 2009 for his residence and exhibition “Pierre” at L’appartement 22 in Rabat. This was followed by the exhibition “Pierre Pierre” at the Esther Schipper gallery in Berlin, and by “Salo” – which has just closed – at Kunstverein Braunschweig.

The subject areas and materials presented in the exhibition at Noisy-le- Sec are equally multifaceted. “Atol” is a installation displaying burnished brass plates and including butterfly collections and batiks. Furthermore Braun has three rooms filled with five centimetre-thick screed, and illuminates the whole space with black light, resulting in a surreal atmosphere. Part of this installation – Pierre Pierre – is a tenpart series of black-and-white offset prints also titled Pierre Pierre. It features motifs from different sources : for example, the photograph of an African mask is a poster motif for the first Festival des Arts Nègres that took place in 1966 in Dakar and makes reference to the ambivalent personage Léopold S. Senghor. As early as the thirties, Senghor, a lyric poet and Senegal’s first elected president, was a formative influence on the worldwide Négritude movement and exemplified the reciprocal and contradictory influences between Europe and Africa.

Braun’s approach for the most part condenses a mix of facts, meanings, images and forms into a complex network of associations in which each object and each of the materials used transcends itself. Part of this is a search in which he pursues historical, cultural, or biographical contexts that are brought together by a process of association. Braun’s telling and assembling of individual “stories” impressively present the development of history as a fragile process within the cultural production of meaning. In doing so, his associations are always consciously speculative and unstable, without establishing fixed contexts.

Hilke Wagner, Director of the Kunstverein Braunschweig (Germany)

Translated by John Tittensor

^{The exhibition “Salo” is a proposal from Kunstverein Braunschweig in Germany as part of Thermostat, a cooperative project involving 24 French centres d’art and German Kunstvereine from June 2010 to April 2011. In exchange, La Galerie presented a solo show by Evariste Richer in Braunschweig from 5 June to 15 August 2010.}