Double #1: Judith Kakon - Iris / Lou Masduraud - Mananagement opera
Saturday, February 10, 2024 – Sunday, April 14, 2024
The new exhibition format Double brings together two artists engaging in a dialog with their distinct artistic approaches. The aim is to foster a meeting of regional and international art production devoid of competition and to uncover unexpected thematic connections within two independent projects. For the first edition, curator Simone Neuenschwander has invited artists Judith Kakon (b. 1988, Basel, lives in Basel) and Lou Masduraud (b. 1990, Montpellier, lives in Geneva).
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Judith Kakon has titled her exhibition Iris, encompassing various connotations related to names, mythology, corporality, and nature. Drawing from this multivalence, she approaches the exhibition as a medium and conceptualizes the space as a dispositif that takes up elements from our everyday lives and commercial activities. Within the exhibition rooms, familiar motifs from urban daily life, such as lamps, a boundary stone, or stackable flowerpots emerge through a unique form of ornamentation. By deliberately playing with size, materials, and reproductions, Kakon creates new contexts that consistently engage with social, political, and sensual dimensions. Through the arrangement and repetition of her works, she continually introduces semantic shifts, prompting contemplation on how institutional and public spaces are structured.
Lou Masduraud stages collective habits to expose their underlying dynamics of power and desire. Using a vocabulary of forms that is both grotesque and poetic, the artist constructs phantasmagorical realms that weave fictions about prevailing realities. In her exhibition, she presents sculptures that address the organization of human activity within the city and its infrastructures. Drainage channels and modified fountains are as reminiscent of Renaissance fountains as they are of public urinals. In a surreal manner, she depicts paths of flowing water that parallel the human body, inhabited by an array of organisms and parasites. The exhibition unfolds in three acts like an opera, where sound works activate the sculptures in a sensory and humorous way.
Exhibition views, Judith Kakon - Iris, Kunst Raum Riehen, 2024. Photos: Gina Folly
Exhibition views, Lou Masduraud - Management opera, 2024. Photos: Gina Folly