Trampoline is pleased to support the solo exhibition The Burden of Papa Tonnerre of the artist Pol Taburet at Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin, Germany.

 

In his first solo exhibition in Germany, Pol Taburet (b. 1997, France) presents new paintings, bronze sculptures, and a specially designed scenography at Schinkel Pavillon. Taburet’s work explores themes of transformation, identity, and the interplay between light and shadow. His distinctive visual language combines influences from classical painting, surrealism, and symbolism, resulting in hybrid figures that exist in an ambiguous, in-between state.

 

The architecture of Schinkel Pavillon, which is enclosed on the ground floor but opens into a glass-walled space above, mirrors the contrasts present in Taburet’s work—between interior and exterior, concealment and revelation. His paintings depict creatures merging human and animal characteristics, rendered with a mix of airbrushed gradients and precise brushstrokes. These figures oscillate between presence and absence, reflecting his interest in shifting identities and psychological states. Alongside his paintings, the exhibition features bronze sculptures that bring his pictorial subjects into three-dimensional space, reinforcing themes of metamorphosis and duality.

 

At the heart of the exhibition lies the legend of Papa Tonnerre, a mute figure burdened with the secrets of others. In his silence, he becomes the village’s confessor, carrying the weight of desires, vices, and fears on his body. Seeking release, he strikes a deal with a witch, gaining speech in exchange for a set of stolen relics : a bell, a trumpet, a beast-headed vial, and some pepper. But his newfound voice leads to his downfall—overcome by rage, he betrays those who once trusted him, unleashing their darkest truths upon the world. His punishment is exile, condemned to speak forever into the void, never to be heard again.

Trampoline is pleased to support the solo exhibition The Weight of the Invisible of the artist Wang Bing at Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf, Germany.

 

The Weight of the Invisible is a two-part exhibition dedicated to the documentary work of the filmmaker and photographer Wang Bing (b. 1967 in Xi’an, China, lives in Paris). While Wang Bing’s films are epic in their length and their historical and political scope, they are less concerned with grand events than with the small gestures and everyday acts on which the concrete form and substance of human life rests. The artist devotes a special kind of attention to the small, incidental, and marginal – one that knows that existential weight does not necessarily lie in the obvious, but rather in the in-between, in the interstitial, in the enduring, and in what accumulates.

 

The Weight of the Invisible focuses on Wang Bing’s newest film works – among them a version of his ongoing project Youth, newly conceived as an installation for the Kunstverein – which appear in the second part of the exhibition alongside photographs from his early body of work. There is no predefined narration, no directed story, in these films – everything we see follows the movements and unpredictable course of what unfolds in front of the camera in real time. As Wang Bing puts it : “For me, a story doesn’t belong to this or that literary or cinematographic tradition, but to people’s life” (from,, Conversations with Wang Bing“, Piretti Editore, 2024, p. 34). Thus, minutes, days, months, and years pass in which his whole attention is dedicated to the individuals he is portraying, and in which the camera does nothing more than listen, watch, and record. The deliberate absence of any script is the result of an artistic method in search of a non-hierarchical, open, and direct narrative form, able to approach the uncertainty and complexity of human experience with care and sensitivity. This might be an act of artistic resistance ; against the violently enforced image of (Chinese) national unity, for instance, which Wang Bing’s films bring into question by the immense geographical fragmentation of their locations alone.

Trampoline is pleased to support the solo exhibition Antechamber of the artist Jessica Ekomane at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Germany.

 

“Concentrating on the sense of listening, particularly in contrast to primarily visual languages, has allowed me to investigate alternative forms of perception.” – Jessica Ekomane

 

With Antechamber, the Berlin-based sound artist and computer musician Jessica Ekomane (b.1989, FR) presents a new sound installation, commissioned specifically for the attic of KW. The work continues Ekomane’s inquiry into how sound can act as a transformative force, intertwining her research into mathematical knowledge systems with electronic compositional practices.

 

The sound piece central to Antechamber, a live process computed through a programming software, recurs over the course of the day. Ekomane employs rhythm as a tool for interpreting time, translating these rhythms—from the solar cycle to computation and musical notation—into sound. Through the interplay of noise and rhythmic patterns, the composition emphasizes the cathartic and physical effects of sound, thereby creating an environment where time is not only a sonic, but also a somatic experience. In this way, the multichannel sound installation transforms the attic into a site for embodied listening. Facing all windows, the seating arrangement is designed to send the gaze in and out of the building, offering a space for rest and reflection. Much like an antechamber or waiting room, the attic becomes a liminal site where time stretches, slips, pulses, and passes. Here, the body engages with alternative modes of knowledge through sound, and experiences the relationship between rhythm, mathematics, and time.

Trampoline is pleased to support the solo exhibition A Descent into Paradise of the artist Kader Attia at Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo MUAC in Mexico City, Mexico.

 

The artist proposes a definitive radical turn in our approach to cultures, traditions, and objects by calling attention to repair as a key social and aesthetic operator in global experience. This concept encompasses both intervening materially in objects to restore their functions, and elaborating cultural scars left by bodily mutilations and wounds provoked by political entities, thus compounding social trauma.

 

The show A Descent to Paradise presents a short narrative take on Kader Attia’s recent work, defined by a political-theological interpretation of the idea of modernization. His works allude to images of redemption from a variety of spiritual complexes, and to the critique of modernity’s myths. The exhibition presents multiple perspectives on the pairing of coloniality and modernity : the mirror that, as in Attia’s works, returns every face as a set of incompatible reflections. In its analogical framework connecting culture and loss, repair and scar, and coloniality and phantom limbs, Kader Attia’s work constitutes one of the most original contributions to the art and culture of our time.

Trampoline is pleased to support the solo exhibition of the artist Lili Reynaud-Dewar at Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City, Mexico.

 

“In her first monographic exhibition in Mexico, Lili Reynaud-Dewar presents thirteen video works adapted to this venue. Eight of these were produced in 2023 and consolidate her interest in the construction of masculinity. They are joined by five others recorded in the offices and exhibition spaces of the LAA during the installation of her exhibition. 

 

The anchor of the project are the portraits of various types of masculinity, where the artist reveals the systematic methodology of interviews she has been conducting for some years now with her close circle of friends, family and students, a work she considers both artistic and documentary. Likewise, the hotel rooms where the participants are interviewed form an archive of Paris in the 2020s, an aspect that interests Reynaud-Dewar, who sees art as an anthropological exercise for future generations. The videos also evoke recurring themes in her work, such as the function of the artist, an activity with blurred contours that is both privileged and precarious, lying between the exposure of private life and the increased subjectivity of public life. She highlights the complicated relationship between gender, class and race that unfolds as part of exercising dissidence, in this case, sexual dissidence and activism. 

 

The sequence of portraits is interwoven with five videos created during the mounting of this exhibition. In them Reynaud-Dewar dances naked and alone in the exhibition spaces and offices of LAA, radically confronting the otherness of the museum’s colonial building as well as the works of other artists sharing the space. In contrast to these historical echoes, Reynaud-Dewar’s mobile but silent body asserts the artist’s joyful solitude and vulnerability as a strategy of resistance to counter the intense flux of the world.”

 

Exhibition text by Dorothée Dupuis, curator

Trampoline is pleased to support the solo exhibition of the artist Paul Maheke at Mercer Union, Toronto.

 

Spanning drawing, video, sound, and dance, French artist Paul Maheke’s practice embodies the interplay between the self and the collective in the complex shaping of our identities. His work brings personal narratives into the public forum, challenging us to confront the vulnerable presence of another. Employing contrasting aesthetic strategies of hypervisibility and erasure, Maheke produces environments suspended in productive crises of coherence, where the destabilization of fixed relations gives rise to the open-endedness of his subject.

 

In spite of my own desire to see you disappear is a sound installation that attempts to render the experience of being affected, recognized, and understood. While Maheke’s work in dance often includes his physical presence, here the visual representation of his body is conspicuously absent. He instead uses the temporal, experiential, and emotive qualities of sound to uncover the sensation of the body and guide the audience’s movement.

 

Paul Maheke : In spite of my own desire to see you disappear is commissioned by Mercer Union, Toronto ; and Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin, Lethbridge.

Trampoline is pleased to support the participation of artist Bertille Bak in the exhibition Chapter II : The Color of Energy.

 

Anchored in a chromatic framework, The Color of Energy explores the aesthetic and affective dimensions of how energy is harnessed, consumed, and imagined. This exhibition comes at a crucial juncture in human history, as the global energy crisis has underscored the urgent need to transition to sustainable energy sources. This crisis, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical tensions, has led to a spike in oil and gas prices, rampant inflation, and intensified the call for a shift. The colors in the exhibition narrate stories of conflict, innovation, and adaptation, inviting a reflection not only on how energy shapes our world but also on how it colors our perceptions and emotions : the amber of smog-filled skies, the toxic yellow of acid rains, the rusty orange of oil spills in the ocean, the searing red of wildfires, the blue hue of solar panels, the white of melting glaciers, the gleaming silver of technological advancements, the neon green of radioactive uranium, the blue glow of nuclear reactors, the stark gray of concrete fallout shelters, the lurid greens of money, the pale white of an exhausted face. Through this exploration, the exhibition reveals the subtle energy flows essential for comprehending the complex interplay of forces that shape our society today. It seeks to deepen our awareness of how intricately energy is embedded in the cultural and political fabric of Europe and beyond.

 

Bertille Bak’s art is rooted in her childhood experiences in a migrant family of coal miners in Northern France. Her works often transform everyday realities into mythic narratives, employing film and installation, as well as participation and community building. Her art is both playful and critical, infused with a tongue-in-cheek affection for the habits and traditions of the groups she engages with. Mineur Mineur (2022) offers an exploration of childhood within the global mining industry. The installation features five synchronized video projections that vividly capture the experiences of children in mines across the global South from Bolivia’s silver mines to the sapphire digs of Madagascar. Each video draws the viewer into the paradoxical world of these children, who navigate the dark, labyrinthine tunnels with a sense of play, starkly contrasting their grim surroundings with their innocence. Behind the five screens, a painted rainbowarcs across the wall. This vibrant spectrum acts as a visual counterpoint to the darkness of the haunting soundtrack of accordion music and discordant tones that accompanies the work.

Trampoline supports artists Felix Blume, Claire Fontaine, Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien and Ugo Schiavi’ participation in the next edition of Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana.

Trampoline is pleased to support the solo exhibition of artist Gisèle Vienne in 2024 at Haus am Waldsee. This support follows a series of artist encounters organised for Haus am Waldsee’s Director Anna Gritz, through Trampoline’s curators invitation programme in 2021.

 

The exhibition assembles the life-size puppets created by Gisèle Vienne over the last twenty years in a carefully composed installation alongside a body of photographs by the artist, portraying the range and types of dolls. Staged in the guise of a puppet play the presentation is developed purposefully for the architecture of the Haus am Waldsee, where layers of language, sound, and movement are pitched against the silence and immobility of the exhibited dolls. Here, Vienne creates a field of tension between self-determination and heteronomy, questioning moments that cause consciousness to fracture. The title, This Causes Consciousness to Fracture, is borrowed from a track from the album Patterns of Consciousness (Important Records, 2017) by Caterina Barbieri, Vienne’s collaborator for the stage piece EXTRA LIFE (2023).

 

The exhibition is part of a collaboration between the Haus am Waldsee, the Georg Kolbe Museum, and Sophiensæle, Berlin. All three institutions bring Vienne’s work, in all its complexity, to the city as part of Berlin Art Week 2024 and present different approaches to her multifaceted practice, located between photography, sculpture and installation, film, choreography, and theatre.

Trampoline is pleased to support the production of Pierre Leguillon’s work for the Phenomenon festival on the Greek island of Anafi.

 

For its fifth edition, Phenomenon has invited French artist Pierre Leguillon to take part in the ten-day residency program on the island of Anafi in June-July 2024, and to present a site-specific work in relation to the island and its various histories.

 

Well-known for pushing the boundaries of contemporary art and cinema through his curatorial and critical practice, Pierre Leguillon has over the years developed a body of work characterized by humor and criticism. Site-specificity is an integral part of his artistic practice, which often adopts a performative approach in order to question and subvert systems of knowledge and art production. In his own words : “I work on what surrounds the work : the work of art, the museums, the situation. I always prefer to be at the margin rather than at the center”.

 

For Phenomenon, in keeping with the theme of “return”, Pierre Leguillon decided to revisit his own family history. Born into a family of bakers, he proposed working with the island’s one and only bakery to produce a special bread that would be sold throughout Phenomenon and beyond. Through this work, the artist aims to link the island’s personal and collective histories, activating individual and collective memories, thus creating a bridge between the local and the global, the periphery (a small island on the Aegean Sea) and the center (Europe’s metropolitan cities).

Trampoline is pleased to support Ndayé Kouagou’s 1st solo exhibition in Germany. This support follows a series of artist encounters organised for Westfälischer Kunstverein of Münster’s Director, Kristina Scepanski, through Trampoline’s curators invitation programme in 2021.

 

Ndayé Kouagou’s (b. 1992, Montreuil) various practices invariably start from language. This is his primary source material, for which he then finds a wide variety of forms that are always addressed to a counterpart. In the exhibition at Westfälischer Kunstverein, he brings together four video works, three large aluminium sheets with writing on them and a whole series of other objects made of fabric, acrylic glass and aluminium, which are also supplemented with fragments of text.

 

Kouagou’s artistic practice stems from the process of writing ; he explains how he had been writing about love for a long time and at some point wanted to know whether others felt the same way. How does a text reach its audience ? Out of this question, Kouagou developed a lively performance practice that allowed him to address and confront the audience directly and, above all, to interpret his texts orally. This is how Kouagou – who is self-taught – entered the art world, which he feels can be an exclusive environment on occasion, which is why one of his working principles is that of generosity. He uses this term to summarise his desire for dialogue, openness and enter-tainment, or better still : amusement.

 

The performances developed over time into videos. This provenance is immediately apparent in them, as they show the artist, or the char-acter he is portraying, in life-size and with a direct view of his audience. We have long been accustomed to this type of approach (at least subconsciously) through our consumption of social media and its influence on the visual aesthetics of our everyday lives : the figure of the influencer, the guru, the coach springs to mind – in short : a figure who knows everything and whom we should therefore copy in order to ameliorate our own lives.

 

This is also where the exhibition title comes into play : Sorry, your beloved mum is not always right ! – the mother as the first authority in a person’s life, whom one trusts and in whom one has unconditional faith. Once this assumption is challenged, suddenly everything can be questioned. Is everything my neighbour says, or my work colleague, or the guy on TV always true ? What do you accept without reflection from external sources and where do you actually stand yourself on matters ?

 

Ndayé Kouagou’s special and rare talent is already evident here : the desire to entertain his audience, to be generous and inviting, is in no way accompanied by a loss of depth or sensitivity. This is also one of the artist’s wishes : that the conversations he has with visi-tors through the videos continue to resonate after they have left the exhibition and, indeed, perhaps only then do they really begin.

Trampoline is pleased to support Brice Dellsperger’s 1st solo exhibition in Germany, at the Dortmunder Kunstverein, following the visit to France of its director, Rebekka Seubert, as part of the professional invitations organized by Trampoline in 2022.

 

Brice Dellsperger’s moving image works are characterised by his passion for cinema, which he uses as material for manipulation, reinterpretation, recreation and subversion. His play with the artificial, with imperfections, disruptions, loops and doppelgangers undermines the conventions of cinema and upsets the established relationships of author-viewer, subject-object, desire-representation, film and editing.

 

In his exhibition Jalousies, the artist casts a playful glance through cinema’s transverse slats and shakes up its genre and gender boundaries. Two newly created video works, one of which has been filmed at Dortmunder Kunstverein, complement the ‘Body Double’ series, which the artist has been developing since 1995 and now comprises 40 short films. With this series, Dellsperger explores and subverts the media language of cinema by restaging iconic film sequences from cinema history meticulously, and mostly as low-budget films, with altered gender identities. The result are 30 years in celebrating queer cinema, camp aesthetics and an ironic look at social roles.

 

Brice Dellsperger was born in Cannes in 1972 and lives in Paris. Jalousies is the artist’s first comprehensive institutional solo exhibition in Germany.

Trampoline supports artist Daniel Otero Torres’ participation in the 60th Venice Biennale, with the work Aguacero, presented at the Arsenale.

 

Daniel Otero Torres’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses installations, sculptures, and drawings, all of which are community-based movements of resistance carried out by marginalised groups. Aguacero (2024) unfolds from his prior work Lluvia (2020) and is an ephemeral site-specific installation made of collected locally and recycled materials, reflects Otero Torres’s engagement with the impact of ecological crises on the lives of marginalised Colombians. The work evokes the unusual system of vernacular stilt architecture of the Embera community along the banks of the Atrato River, designed to collect rainwater and provide the inhabitants with unpolluted water. Paradoxically, although they reside in one of the most rainfall-abundant regions, the Emberas face severe challenges in obtaining clean water due to extensive pollution caused by illegal gold mining. Through metaphorical recreation, Otero Torres draws attention to the challenge of ensuring access to clean, drinkable water faced by communities worldwide, an issue that is intricately connected to the processes of privatising and financialising nature. As an open structure to the eyes of the world, the work reveals the journey of flowing water and its many meanings.

Trampoline is pleased to support the retrospective devoted to Marie Losier, at Casa del Lago UNAM in Mexico, in 2024. This support follows a series of artist meetings organized for Cinthya García Leyva, the director of Casa del Lago, as part of Trampoline’s professional invitation program in 2023.

 

With over 20 years’ experience, the work of Marie Losier (FR) has transcended the cinematic field to be presented in museums and exhibition spaces such as the Tate Modern, MoMA and the Centre Georges Pompidou, as well as at prestigious international festivals in cities such as Berlin and Rotterdam.

 

Casa del Lago UNAM presents a wide-ranging retrospective of his work, with screenings of his documentaries and a selection of short films, installations of his loop boxes, a master class and a conference, among other activities organized on our premises and in alternative spaces inside and outside the city.

 

Partners : Trampoline Association, Institut français d’Amérique latine (IFAL), DGECI-PAECI, Museo de la Ciudad de Querétaro and Ambulante. Documentary film tour.

Trampoline is pleased to support the exhibition of Laure Prouvost, Oui Move In You at ACCA in Melbourne, Australia in 2024. This support follows a series of artist encounters organised for ACCA’s director Max Delany, through Trampoline’s professional invitation programme in 2018.

 

Continuing the annual ACCA International series of solo exhibitions by influential artists on the international stage, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art is pleased to present Oui Move In You, a major solo exhibition by French artist Laure Prouvost. Encompassing new commissions and a survey of existing work over the past decade, the exhibition transforms ACCA’s unique architecture into a labyrinthine and other-worldly environment, introducing Australian audiences to the imaginative, absorbing and frequently absurdist hallmarks of Prouvost’s diverse artistic practice.

 

Acknowledging the radical, experimental, and pathfinding figures who came before her, Oui Move In You conceptually explores the roles and legacies of grandmother and grandfather, the maternal spaces of mother and child, and contemporary social spaces in which humans commune with the natural world. The exhibition is composed as a celebration of liberation and imagination, the sensual and sensuous, being and belonging, care and connection. Taking audiences on a journey from the subterranean realm of the underground and the subconscious, opening into the bodily and earthly realm exploring sensuality, desire and the fecundity of nature, the exhibition culminates with a release into the sky and celestial plains of weight and weightlessness, lightness and gravity.

Trampoline is pleased to support the exhibition of Pauline Curnier Jardin & Feel Good Cooperative, Triviale at the MACRO in Italy in 2024. This support follows a series of artist encounters organised for the MACRO’s director Luca Lo Pinto, through Trampoline’s professional invitation programme in 2018.

 

The exhibition Triviale presents the outcomes of the ongoing collaboration between French artist Pauline Curnier Jardin (1980) and the Feel Good Cooperative, founded in Rome in 2020 by the artist herself and composed of a group of Colombian sex workers and their allies, including photographer and sex worker Alexandra Lopez and architect and researcher Serena Olcuire. A balcony, a bed, a streetlight, nocturnal journeys along the margins of Rome, a post-mortem visit to Pope Benedict XVI : the exhibition will consist of a theatrical set in which the public and the domestic nature of sex work are enacted and humorously elaborates on themes of gender identity, migration, the legacy of colonialism, as well as self-representation and self-determination.

 

This is the first time the Cooperative will be presenting their work, in exhibition form, in the same city in which they have been conceiving and creating their collective practice, at once subverting both power dynamics and spatial normativity.

Trampoline is pleased to support the participation of artists Brice Dellsperger and Marc Camille Chaimowicz in the exhibition Bruno Pélassy and the Order of the Starfish held in 2023 at Haus am Waldsee in Berlin.

 

Haus am Waldsee is pleased to present the first comprehensive presentation of the work of French artist Bruno Pélassy (*1966 in Vientiane, Laos, † 2003 in Nice, FR) in Germany. The exhibition, conceived by Anna Gritz (Director, Haus am Waldsee) and curated together with Beatrice Hilke (Assistant Curator, Haus am Waldsee) and Pia-Marie Remmers (Curatorial Assistant, Haus am Waldsee), is conceived as a monographic presentation of Pélassy’s oeuvre, juxtaposing it with works by amongst others Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Beth Collar, Jesse Darling, Brice Dellsperger, Leonor Fini, Jean Painleve, James Richards and Soshiro Matsubara, who will also develop the architecture for the exhibition. The aim is to bring the explosive nature of his work into a current international art discourse and put it up for discussion.

 

The French artist Bruno Pélassy was born in 1966 and died in 2003 at the age of 36 as a result of AIDS. He was a dazzling and multifaceted figure and his art can only be categorized to a limited extent. Pélassy painted, drew, performed, and created sculptures, fashion, and jewelry, so that disciplinary boundaries sometimes blur and artistic work can hardly be separated from his approach to daily life. The artist had already contracted HIV at the age of 21 – at a time when an infection was basically tantamount to a death sentence. The diagnosis was to decisively and visibly shape his work as well as his attitude to themes such as illness, infection, death, social interaction, structures of desire, preservation, and his understanding of the body as a system closely interwoven with its environment. Based on Pélassy’s works, in which his engagement with these existential themes emerges, the exhibition thus addresses questions that are exceedingly relevant, not least against the backdrop of two years of global pandemic. It reflects on the constitution of health, the transience of the body, and a failing political system in which illness can certainly be understood as an indicator of social power relations.

 

Curatorially, the project thereby explores the experiment of being neither a monographic survey nor a group exhibition. Thus, Pélassy’s works are presented alongside a number of existing works by contemporaries as well as newly commissioned productions by currently working artists who are close to Pélassy in attitude, interests, or formal choices, and who negotiate issues that were already central to him and in his time.

Trampoline is pleased to support the solo exhibition of Abdelkader Benchamma at Power Plant in Toronto, titled Solastalgia : Archaeologies of Loss.

 

Envisioned as a geological epic of our universe, Solastalgia : Archaeologies of Loss is a solo exhibition by French artist Abdelkader Benchamma that conjures enigmatic worlds and elemental forces at the precipice of transformation, evoking a yearning for worlds yet to be. Like an archaeologist, Benchamma unearths symbols–found in ancient mythologies and legends–that humanity has from its earliest moments inscribed onto the land, sky, and celestial bodies. In doing so, he creates an elusive topography of dreams that centres our spiritual ties with nature, reclaiming our interconnectedness with the world.

 

Envisioned as a geological epic of our universe, Solastalgia : Archaeologies of Loss is a solo exhibition by French artist Abdelkader Benchamma that conjures enigmatic worlds and elemental forces at the precipice of transformation, evoking a yearning for worlds yet to be. Like an archaeologist, Benchamma unearths symbols–found in ancient mythologies and legends–that humanity has from its earliest moments inscribed onto the land, sky, and celestial bodies. In doing so, he creates an elusive topography of dreams that centres our spiritual ties with nature, reclaiming our interconnectedness with the world.

Trampoline is pleased to support the cabaret of Julie Béna at the steirischer herbst festival in Austria, titled Stories of Rivers (2023).

 

A cabaret about abortion ? Impossible, or so it would seem, considering how terminations of pregnancy are still stigmatized as creepy and cruel. Julie Bénaʼs cabaret challenges this assumption. Joined on stage by her mother and daughter, she embarks upon a hyperbolic three-chapter show of stories, songs, mimes, and dances, aiming to elicit that little vibration right before screams of terror or laughter.

 

Julie Béna (1982, Paris, France) is an artist working with sculpture, installation, film, and performance. Her work draws upon an eclectic set of references, combining contemporary and ancient literature, high and low art, humor and seriousness, parallel times and spaces. In 2012–13, she was part of the Pavillon, the art research lab at Palais de Tokyo, Paris. In 2018, she was nominated for the AWARE prize for women artists. Over the past years, Béna has developed personal cosmologies staging seemingly banal characters and objects that have enigmatic conversations and interactions with each other. She lives in Prague and Paris.

Trampoline is pleased to support the solo exhibition of Pol Taburet at Pivô in São Paulo in 2023, titled Pol Taburet : Sweets for the sweets.

 

Pol Taburet’s work is a heady and iconoclastic mix of references that range from the artist’s own Caribbean background, the region’s synchretic voodoo traditions and belief systems, wider contemporary culture, as well as classical painting. Born in 1997, the artist has rapidly gained attention with his idiosyncratic painterly style, which he has developed by incorporating the use of airbrushing alongside
traditional brush painting with acrylic colors. The formal result is a unique contraposition of textures and finishings, of painstaking detail, “impressionistic” suggestion and symbolism.

 

Trampoline is pleased to support the participation of artists Ndayé Kouagou and Tarik Lakhrissi in the exhibition Words Don’t Go There in 2023 at Braunschweig in Germany.

 

How does language structure community ? And what is left unsaid ? The interdisciplinary exhibition project Words Don’t Go There presents spatial sound and text works as well as videos and performances that focus on poetry and language as a means of (world) inquiry. Each language forms its own order in which some ways of experiencing the world find no place. The artistic contributions reveal this limiting effect of language and reflect on its social, political and poetic consequences. Through sound and acoustics, sculptural practice, performance or silence, they intervene in the existing linguistic and architectural environment of Villa Salve Hopes. They enable marginalized voices to be heard, overwrite unambiguously inhabited spaces, open up new ways of accessing the world by breaking away from everyday understandings of language, uncovering unexpected horizons of possibility, and placing hitherto marginalized experiences and forms of expression at the center. The exhibition also consists of work shops, lectures, and performances that take up and expand upon the themes and concerns of the project in manifold ways.

Trampoline is pleased to support the solo exhibition of Sara Sadik at the Kunsthalle Lissabon in Portugal in 2023, titled Dors petit dors. This support follows a series of artist encounters organised for the Kunsthalle’s director Luis Silva, through Trampoline’s professional invitation programme in 2018.

 

Sara Sadik’s solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Lissabon is a multi-channel video installation inspired by gaming aesthetics. The title “Dors petit dors” comes from the eponymous song by French rapper JuL, a song taking the form of a lullaby aimed at young boys who live in complicated households. Through game simulations, dreams, and myths, the artist tells us of ordinary kids whose stories become metaphors of much more multifaceted conditions which also delve into the tropes of masculinity and their affects.

 

Sara Sadik, was born in 1994 in Bordeaux (FR), she now lives and works in Marseille (FR). Sadik describes her work as « Beurcore » : the essence of North African-descended youth living in French suburbs culture. Based on semiological and sociological analyses of the « beurness », Sara Sadik brings many alter-egos which she plays in short-video using chromakey, 3D modulation and other CGI post-production techniques and linked them with sculptural elements via installation. She reengages visual aesthetics, economic systems and languages used and/or created by this community, in order to create fictional and surreal situations which take place either in the present or in the near future. By shifting many codes, Sara Sadik tries to create a composite vision which tends to singled out from what can be seen on mass-media and produces future possibilities. In 2016, Sara Sadik created Melissa Lacoste, a french R’n’B singer whose lyrics are an autotuned anthem to Marseille, the sprawling coastal city from South of France. In December, 2016, she released her first album « Gadji en Or », and performed it during the « Gadji en Or European Tour » in clubs, festivals and exhibition openings in Paris, Berlin, Geneva, Brussels and Rotterdam. Sara Sadik received in 2018 her MFA Fine Arts with highest honours at Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux, France.

Trampoline is pleased to support the solo exhibition of Nils Alix-Tabeling at the Dortmunder Kunstverein in Germany in 2023, titled But who is Ulrike Mandrake ? This support follows a series of artist encounters organised for the Kunstverein’s director Rebekka Seubert, through Trampoline’s professional invitation programme in 2020-22.

 

In his multimedia performances and installations Nils Alix-Tabeling (*1991 in Paris) moves on the threshold between fiction and reality. His works quote from science fiction, fashion, historical objects and furniture, shamanism and drag – critically reflecting the history of institutional violence against female and queer bodies.

But who is Ulrike Mandrake ? reconsiders the legacy of 1970s terrorism. The title evokes the name of a fictional character and suggests a semantic connection between the journalist and RAF terrorist Ulrike Meinhof (1934-1976) and the poisonous medicinal and ritual plant mandrake, which visually resembles human figures. It also refers to the human longing to penetrate to a supposed root of evil through scientific understanding. With an extensive new group of works as well as a performance, the artist navigates between the times, worlds, ambivalences and wounds that this topic opens up.

 

Nils Alix-Tabeling studied fine arts at the Academy La Cambre, Brussels and at the Royal College of Art, London. His works have been shown internationally, including at Palazzo Bollani, Venice (2022), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2019) and Kunstraum, London (2019). The Kunstverein presents his first institutional exhibition in Germany.

Trampoline is pleased to support the participation of artist Annette Messager in the group exhibition The Cuteness Factor held in 2023 at the Ludwig Museum – Museum of Contemporary Art in Budapest.

 

Cuteness first appeared in paintings and prints in Japan during the Edo period (17th–19th centuries). It then became popular in the 1970s with the rise of kawaii (the Japanese word for cute), a cultural phenomenon that permeated all aspects of life, and gradually spread throughout the world. Today, cuteness can also be seen as a global visual trend, with distinctive elements originating from the visual world of pop culture (e.g. manga and anime, cartoons and video games).

 

Today, we are witnessing the universality and widespread presence of “cuteness”. Alongside social media posts, emojis and gifs, this aesthetic is reflected in a multitude of logos, advertisements and anthropomorphised objects. What is the source of its enduring popularity ? What social processes or crises does its increased presence reflect ? How does contemporary art relate to this visual phenomenon, and what potential or danger does it represent ? These questions are not only of concern to professionals, but may also be important for the viewer to answer.

 

The aesthetics of cuteness has also influenced contemporary visual artists due to the large amount of visual, mainly digital, content in constant circulation. The conditions offered by social media, and determined by the necessity of technology (square aesthetics), blur the boundaries between art and commodity, between self-expression and material gain (e.g. influencers), and thus public and private life often become inextricably intertwined . At the same time, the fact that cuteness in contemporary art draws much of its inspiration from visual means of expression that do not belong to high art but to comics, cartoons and video games, further reinforces the decentralised nature of contemporary culture as a phenomenon.

 

The exhibition The Cuteness Factor is the first major presentation of the theme in Hungary and in the region. The exhibition features 32 artists from 14 countries, including internationally renowned contemporary artists as well as young artists from Hungary and the region.

Trampoline is pleased to support the solo exhibition of the artist duo Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at the MACRO in Italy in 2023, titled The Bidet and the Jar. This support follows a series of artist encounters organised for the MACRO’s director Luca Lo Pinto, through Trampoline’s professional invitation programme in 2018.

 

Through the use of traditional craft production techniques and materials, the British-French artist duo Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel explore potential forms of sculptural practice and their relationship to manual labour. Their work—which lies between representation and function, the ready-made and craftsmanship—engages with popular imagery and produces a symbolic and functional displacement of everyday objects.

 

The Bidet and the Jar is a response to the experimental nature of MACRO’s Rehearsal section, and sees the artists further their forays into creating ceramic artworks, all the while maintaining a level of uncertainty with respect to the outcome. The stoneware sculptures are produced by the artists themselves using a traditional wood-fired kiln fabricated in their studio, dimensioned for a large scale of production. The size of the kiln, their commitment to hand modelling the clay, and the technique of high-temperature wood firing afford Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel the opportunity to develop a ceramic practice rooted in repetition and open to accidents and chance events. In contrast to this empirical and “artisan” approach, the duo have chosen to appropriate and refabricate a repertoire of industrial ceramics, habitually mass-produced within a factory environment.

Trampoline is pleased to support the solo exhibition of Tarik Kiswanson at Museo Tamayo in Mexico in 2023, titled Nido. This support follows a series of artist encounters organised for the Museo Tamayo’s director Magalí Arriola, through Trampoline’s professional invitation programme in 2021-22.

 

The work of Tarik Kiswanson (Halmstad, Sweden, 1986) explores moments and spaces of transition that often become milestones in human lives : the passage from childhood to adolescence, the displacement from one context to another, the fluctuation of territories and geopolitical borders, as well as transformative phenomena such as nomadism, diaspora and migration.

 

A child of emigrants from Palestine, the Paris-based artist addresses concepts such as otherness, transparency and opacity, drawing from Édouard Glissant’s postcolonial writings and his poetics of miscegenation. Like the silhouettes of children in his drawings that seem to fumble for the edges of the spaces that contain them, Kiswanson’s work emerges from one place to another, in an attempt to expand the uncertain boundaries between identity and difference.

Trampoline is pleased to support the solo exhibition of Atiéna R. Kilfa, The Unhomely, at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin in 2022 following the visit to France of its curator Anna Gritz, through Trampoline’s professional invitation program in 2021. The exhibition is co-produced in partnership with Camden Art Centre in London, where an iteration of the exhibition will be staged from 27 January to 26 March 2023.

 

The exhibition The Unhomely at KW Institute for Contemporary Art marks the first institutional solo presentation by Atiéna R. Kilfa (b.1990, FR). Kilfa uses photography, sculpture, video, and installations to explore how personal and cultural memories tend to conflict and overlap. Her most recent work draws on her interest in the composition of models, dioramas, still lives, and tableaux vivants, which she sees as sites loaded with inherited narratives and social codes, opening them up for collective review.

 

The Unhomely stages a new video work alongside architectural fragments, transactional sound, and miniature sculpture, probing the memory of “home” as an impossible “virtual” architecture. Amidst an all-consuming installation that plays with scale and proportion, the eponymous video work, presented on an architectural stage, places the viewer behind the camera. The narrative of the video unfolds inside a staircase that is perceived as a Huis Clos, a never-ending loop, in which the viewer encounters “architectural ghosts”. These ghosts deviate from the stand-in human silhouettes that oftentimes populate contemporary architectural models, providing us with a sense of depth and scale. The figures in The Unhomely thus become actors themselves, pointing towards the daily lives of their imagined inhabitants, whether real or fictional, and uniting the past and the present.

 

Two further elements of the installation implicate the presence of the viewer in the production of the work. A scaled miniature of the film’s staircase represents an impossible replica, leaving the viewer with a confusing desire to compare their own position to that in the film and the model. A quotation from both the film and the model, the architectural stage used by Kilfa functions as a Foley instrument that reacts and reverberates to the movement of the audience, adding a sonic and spatial dimension to the experience of the work. Traditionally, Foley is a postproduction technique used to enhance the audio quality in moving images by overlaying synchronized studio recordings of everyday sounds. In Kilfa’s work, however, it serves to further heighten the viewer’s sense of complicity in the production of the work.

Originally planned for 2021 and postponed due to the pandemic, the 16th edition of the Biennale de Lyon titled manifesto of fragility opened after two and a half years of extensive research and preparation with 40 diverse institutional partners in Lyon and abroad.

 

The exhibition curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, Directors of the Hamburger Bahnhof – National Gallery for contemporary Art in Berlin, presented the exhibitions at 12 venues in Lyon, including several of the city’s museums, as well as abandoned sites such as the former Fagor Factory of 29.000 sqm, and the building of the former Guimet Museum, opening again to the public after 15 years. In total, 87 contemporary artists of over 36 nationalities were invited to participate in this edition, including 26 % who live in France.

 

Trampoline participated in discussions with curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath during their research and contributed to this significant project on an exceptional basis in order to support artists of the French art scene, particularly the works presented by four artists :

 

Mali Arun • Sarah del Pino • Léo Fourdrinier • Sara Sadik

Trampoline is pleased to support the participation of artist Anna Solal in the group exhibition Wet Resistance held in 2022 at the Dortmunder Kunstverein in Germany. This support follows the encounters organised for the Kunstverein’s director Rebekka Seubert, through Trampoline’s professional invitation program in 2020.

 

The exhibition Wet Resistance begins its narration with a dystopia : in a dried-out world dominated by moisture-repelling technology and artificial intelligence, wet resistance emerges in defence of natural, humid, human qualities, and celebrates moisture as exchange, humour and life. A large-scale installation of tiles and metal plants by José Montealegre becomes a landscape in which the works of eight international artists are embedded. Wet Resistance contrasts the wet, mossy, growing, overgrown and irrational with the dry, clean, rational, technical and broken. The human body, with its high water content, is conceived as an organism entangled with the world in which it lives and which it constantly co-creates.

Trampoline is pleased to support the solo exhibition of Eva Barto, Sharp Smile, at MACRO in 2022 following the visit to France of its director Luca Lo Pinto, through Trampoline’s professional invitation program in 2018.

 

Sharp Smile is an exhibition project conceived for MACRO by artist Eva Barto (1987) to unfold with and in contrast to its counterpart in Paris, the show Weak Tongue at Le Plateau – Frac île-de-France. Both exhibitions, which take place one after the other, continue and expand Barto’s research into the relationships that govern the codes of property and production, and in particular into the legal and economic infrastructures that regulate liaisons of philanthropy and patronage in the contemporary artworld.

The artist Bady Dalloul participates in the group exhibition The Equality of Possibility, held at the Kunstverein Bielefeld in 2021, following the artist meetings organised for its director, Nadine Droste, as part of the professional invitation programs of Trampoline.

 

The group exhibition The Equality of Possibility, featuring the work of Bady Dalloul, Flint Jamison, Lia Perjovschi, Lorenza Longhi, Ramaya Tegegne, and Rindon Johnson, frames questions of political equality in terms of aesthetic thought. It takes equality not to be a given, but rather a preconditioning act, one which does not refer to individual capacities, whether natural or socially or culturally acquired. Going back to the early Kunstvereine (art associations) of the nineteenth century, we find that they too followed the ideal of making art public and thus accessible to everyone. In the present day, questioning our own structures of representation – and the associated conditions of accessibility – remains a highly relevant task.

 

The exhibition is based on a number of questions, which we cordially invite you to reflect on with us. How can we conceive of different forms of equality from the perspective of art ? In what ways can we critically question the prevailing mechanisms of the art field ? What does this specifically mean for artistic production in today’s circumstances ? What role do spectators have in all of this ? The Equality of Possibility features an extensive program of accompanying events, including artists’ talks, lectures, and workshops held in cooperation with Bielefeld University and the Bethel Theater Workshop. We also offer inclusive tours particularly aimed at people with visual impairments.

Trampoline is pleased to support the participation of artist Anita Molinero in the group exhibition Nimmersatt ? Imagining Society without Growth held in three institutions of Münster – Kunsthalle Münster, LWL Museum für Kunst und Kultur and Westfälischer Kunstverein. This support follows the visit to France of the Kunstverein’s director Kristina Scepanski, through Trampoline’s professional invitation program earlier that year.

 

Human activity has a decisive influence on the environment. The economically privileged global North is largely of the opinion that there is no other option than that of growth. Yet growth is finite, processes have got out of balance, are developed on the basis of social inequality and the exploitation of nature/the environment. This makes it imperative for us diverge from existing paths, to deliberately abandon customary maxims regarded as self-evident, and to engage in a discussion about the dogma of more and more, further and further. Wealth and the constant growth of capital alone cannot deliver on the promise of happiness. What is necessary is to reconsider what has been valid to date and to act in a spirit of community. What can take the place of the economic and social models that have prevailed to date ? How can renunciation become a matter of future-oriented routine ? What regional and global measures can provide a new resource and climate-friendly definition of consumption, and what new ideas in the sense of creative resourcefulness can be introduced into society ? Can we imagine new objectives concerning to communal life, can we change our habits and act individually and jointly ? The group exhibition “Nimmersatt ? Imagining Society without Growth” takes as its point of departure the current state of our environment and the prevailing social conditions. In the face of mutually determining events and developments, such as social inequality, climate changes, illness, war, flight and xenophobia, the exhibition uses the widespread lack of orientation and helplessness so as to highlight and explore by artistic means concrete visions and also utopias of a society beyond growth maxims.

Trampoline is pleased to support the solo exhibition of Mohamed Bourouissa, “HARa ! ! ! ! !!hAaaRAAAAA ! ! ! !!hHAaA ! ! !” at Goldsmiths CCA in 2021 following the visit to France of its director Sarah McCrory, through Trampoline’s professional invitation program in 2018.

 

Artist Mohamed Bourouissa (b. 1978, Blida, Algeria) is known for confronting complex socio-economic issues and for seeking out tensions between different social contexts. In-depth research, including long periods of engagement with specific locales and groups, inform works that question collective histories, uses of public space, and representational identities. This solo survey show features new and existing works by Bourouissa across photography, sound, installation and moving image made since 2003, in what will be his first solo show with a UK public institution.

 

His celebrated work Horse Day (2014-15) is included in the exhibition, and saw the artist live for eight months among a low-income community in North Philadelphia to create an event and film with the horse riders of its urban stables – making, as he terms it, a contemporary American cowboy movie. The charged legacies of colonialism, and contemporary realities of racial and socioeconomic inequality, are present throughout Bourouissa’s work ; including the recent Brutal Family Roots (2020), which fuses hip-hop with installation to track patterns of exchange between Britain, Australia, France and Algeria, through the spread of the Acacia tree species.

 

Throughout his work, Bourouissa builds poetics by examining contemporary society ; often documenting disenfranchised groups and individuals who have been “left behind at the crossroads of integration and exclusion”, but who use the tools at their disposal to navigate their situation. For example, a new work HARA ! ! ! ! !!hAAARAAAAA ! ! ! !!hHARAAA ! ! ! (2020) abstracts the invented word ‘hara’ used by young lookouts to alert drug dealers of approaching police in Marseilles. The distorted word becomes a sound installation in the vein of concrete poetry.

 

The presentation of Bourouissa’s work in the context of the gallery brings into relief different circulations of images and their economies. These circuits, their violence and corruptibility, are exploited and disrupted in works such as ALL IN (2012) and Shoplifters (2014). In these, as with all his works, Bourouissa moves between different modes of photographic and filmic techniques with irreverence and instinct. From grainy smartphone images in works like Temps Mort (2008-9) – in which the artist exchanged images, videos and messages with an incarcerated friend – to street photography in Nous Sommes Halles (2003-5), and canonical art historical framings of Parisian street life via Delacroix in the series Périphéries (2006-8) ; each mode and medium is exploited for its ability to conceptually articulate incisive statements on contemporary image culture and a racialised social fabric of inequality.

 

BIOGRAPHY

Mohamed Bourouissa (b. 1978, Blida, Algeria) currently lives and works in Paris, France. He has exhibited at institutions and biennials including : Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, FR ; Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR ; Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, US ; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NE ; basis, Frankfurt, DE ; Le Bal, Paris, FR ; Haus der Kunst, Munich, DE ; FRAC Franche-Comté, Besançon, FR ; Sharjah, Havana, Lyon, Venice, Algiers, Liverpool and Berlin Biennales ; Milan Triennial, Milan, IT.

Trampoline is pleased to support the participation of artists Louidgi Beltrame (France) and Minia Biabiany (Guadeloupe) in the group exhibition A Natural History of Ruins taking place at Pivô, São Paulo in 2021.

 

A Natural History of Ruins is a group exhibition that explores different forms of resistance to the ways in which the hegemonic modern colonial imagery has captured our imagination. Drawing from diverse artistic practices, this exhibition seeks to offer opportunities to think about healing in what author Anna Tsing calls a “precarious survival”. It also attempts to address the implications of representation outside of language in order to explore other-than-human technologies and forms of intelligence.

 

• exhibition booklet

 

Trampoline is pleased to support the solo exhibition of Gaëlle Choisne, “Temple of Love – Agony” at Hamidrasha Gallery – Hayarkon 19, Tel Aviv.

 

Temple of Love – Agony is the new chapter in Gaëlle Choisne’s ongoing exploration of the concept of love. Following Roland Barthes’ book “A Lover’s Discourse : Fragments,” she focuses in the current exhibition on the idea of agony, on “the fear of a breakdown which has already been experienced,” to quote from Barthes. Choisne’s installation explores the idea of love as a social and political matter, an attitude and form of resistance and a catalyst for courage and transgression. Love in this ongoing project becomes a social and spiritual issue, a channeling source of profoundly political actions. Choisne created a space for dialogue and conversation that invites people to collaborate and take part in the exhibition.

 

The exhibition was created in collaboration with My Luvs : Roxanne Maillet, Marie-Carmel Brouard, Crystell Mess, Agnes Noel, Euvonie Reynald and Megg Rayara Gomes de Oliveira. Previous chapters took place at Bétonsalon in Paris, The Mistake Room in Los Angeles, and Zachęta Project Room in Warsaw.

 

The exhibition is supported by Trampoline Association and The French Institute in Tel Aviv.

Trampoline is pleased to announce its support to Mimosa Echard’s new project for the second Macfarlane Commissions at ACCA, Melbourne in 2020.

 

The Macfarlane Commissions is a biennial series of exhibitions at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art featuring new commissions by emerging and mid-career Australian and international artists. The second iteration of this biennial series, Overlapping Magisteria, considers the role of biology, ecology, archaeology and site, as well as ideas of material transformation and alchemy, through artists who engage organic materials, laws of nature, deep time, ideas of growth and shapeshifting, as well as formlessness, entropy and abjection. It is intended that ACCA’s galleries will be transformed through intense sensory and material effect, with works encompassing living and artificial organisms and processes, and installations and assemblages of narrative and material significance.

Trampoline supported the participation of artists Pierre Joseph and Claude Closky in the group exhibition Time is Thirsty at Kunsthalle Wien.

 

Time Is Thirsty is a journey through time and space in the form of an exhibition : A complex ensemble of contemporary artworks and artefacts from the early 90s – more precisely from 1992, the founding year of the Kunsthalle Wien. The exhibition presents an immersive time-space in which the boundaries between the decades become unstable : Whether we are dealing with a relic from the 90s, a present-day phenomenon, what we encounter remains uncertain.

• exhibition booklet