THESE WORKS SUGGEST DIFFERING LANDSCAPES IN WHICH AN EVENT OR SITUATION MAY OCCUR AT ANY TIME, GREATLY ALTERING THEM. THE WORKS CREATE A STATE OF SUSPENSION, INTERRUPTION, AND DELIBERATE UNFINISHEDNESS, IN WHICH NOTHING SEEMS TO BE HAPPENING, AND NOTHING IS EXPLICITLY SAID, EITHER, BUT WHERE FOR PRECISELY THESE REASONS EVERYTHING BECOMES POSSIBLE. ALL WORKS PRESENTED HERE BELONG TO THE FRAC BOURGOGNE (DIJON) COLLECTION EXCEPT JÁN MANČUŠKA’S ONE WHICH HAS BEEN BORROWED FOR THE OCCASION TO ANOTHER FRENCH PUBLIC COLLECTION: FRAC LORRAINE (METZ)

The eleven works brought together incorporate video, sound, sculpture, text and site specific installations in the exhibition area like so many ways of suggesting to visitors that they grasp a present state. Indeed, by different devices, the works dilated the here-and-now, and came up with its essence, honing both consciousness and experience. Within the visit, the public will face and improve the little by little possible irruption of an event.

The ephemeral, the fleeting, and the transitory are the pivotal principle of the work produced by Francis Alys. His works are often subtle and immaterial in the city humdrum, drawing their material from observation of the cityscape. Untitled (New York, September 2000, 2001), produced in 2001, is a video installation showing a picture of Manhattan, a tight shot of tall buildings in which many vertical and horizontal grids are overlaid. Taken at a distance, the static shot nevertheless varies on the basis of the sun’s appearances and disappearances, and the lighting of rooms in the buildings. The film is accompanied by a Boogie Woogie recording, in tribute to Mondrian’s painting Broadway Boogie Woogie, which was painted in New York during the Second World War, and represents the final culmination of his pictorical research. The squares of colours create a vibration and a vital rhythm which shift from intersection to intersection, just like the streets of New York City. Francis Alys illustrates the liveliness of this cultural legacy, using video, in his turn, to create a painting that moves infinitesimally.

The video Where she is at (2001), by Johanna Billing shows a young woman standing on a diving board in the grip of a lengthy shall-I or-shan’t-I. The film was shot at Ingierstrand, a seaside resort designed by Ole Lind Schistad and Eyvind Mostue in 1934, one of the last functionalist architectural constructions remaining in Oslo, and a symbol of the mood of that period. Today, the site has been abandoned. All that remains is the diving board. Johanna Billing captures a moment of uncertainty and anxiety, as caught in the rather ordinary act of diving. Involved here is a moment of doubt and questioning when faced with a free choice which a person must make on her own. She captures a moment in which a person wants to go beyond herself, and lingers on this moment of freedom in which a person will wonder whether he or she ought to do certain things, or not. This hesitant young woman puts up resistance. And it is this kind of resistance that interests the artist. At the same time, Johanna Billing films the people at the foot of the diving board. It seems as if everyone is waiting for the outcome and ending. Everyone is in a state of expectation, be it the people watching the young woman, or the video viewers. A real empathy is introduced. The young woman cannot go back. We see her struggling and fighting with herself. What is she going to do? The landscape itself seems in a state of suspension, hanging on the outcome.

In Jonas Dahlberg’s new film View Through a Park (2009), the viewer follows a single camera movement from the interior of one apartment, though an idyllic city park, to its facing apartment. Set at night, the dreamlike shot travels endlessly between these two buildings. Unlike Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) where the voyeuristic gaze is achieved with a zoom lens, the viewer in View Through a Park travels with the gaze, thereby revealing the physicality of seeing. The gaze is not voyeuristic until it reaches its destination. Dahlberg nods his hat to Michelangelo Antonioni’s film The Passenger from 1975 - the transition from inside to outside through the glass of the window is seamless and thereby non-physical. Inside the apartment the movement is that of a searching eye in a domestic space - the viewer becomes a silent intruder.

The work of Dora García updates the tangent limit within which it is played the fictional fate of our world. Fahrenheit 451 (1957), 2002 is an installation made of a rectangular wooden table on which 2000 copies of the Bradbury’s novel are spread on a perfect built pile: as an answer to the cluster uncontrolled burning of books in the fictional story. Indeed, Fahrenheit 451 (1957) functions as a mirror that would plastically answer to science-fiction. The 2000 publications presented (an edition of 1957) are printed in reverse mirror. Although the novel focuses on the real literature fate (books embodied), the work of Dora García – through a “feedback” effect - seems to announce the potential of fictional reality. And if the installation exists on an allegorical mode (on the one hand, the work makes reference to Bradbury in order to put on view its significance; on the other hand, the work is structurally built on the accumulation mode as to further highlight the mixture of the imagination with reality, the refraction of reality). Fahrenheit 451 (1957) shows us that the reception is never something transparent. It is the result of impregnation, of an incarnation.

Gaylen GERBER’s piece, Backdrop, 1998, as its title suggests, functions as a background for other works, these ones determine in fact the date of Gaylen Gerber’s work. Indeed, Backdrop exists in the present of the exhibition and therefore it has only the date of the execution of the work it supports. This will of the artist tends to focus on the instant of its production. This element permanently destroys any chronology and makes the work exist at the time when it is shown and used. Through his installation, the artist structure over time. He says this: "I constantly transform the time-space and space-time which, in a sense, destroyed their relationship." On one hand, the work exists when it is exhibited; on the other hand, it exists when the viewer enters in it. The new environment that Backdrop creates sets up a situation in which each of the strolling becomes a force to organize the space.

The works of Henrik Hakansson focus on observation and recording of ecosystems and natural microcosms that he literally recreates in the exhibition room or reproduced through video devices. By the observation of plants, birds, insects or other creatures and their surroundings, and on the question of possible forms of dialogue between human beings and nature, the artist explores the boundaries between culture and nature, while addressing the loss of a species, the loss of art, and issues of collecting and theft in the natural world. Henrik Hakansson’s sound installation The Skylark. The Optimal Flight to Nowhere and Somewhere (2002) deals with the theme of birds and, more precisely, with the flight of a skylark.

The Guillaume LEBLON's series of "Chrysocales" takes its name from this material to the appearance of bronze, zinc, copper and tin. By analogy, the word refers to pupae in silk such architectures which holds the secret of moulting. The Guillaume Leblon's Chrysocales also contain secrets: exhibition models, drawings, plans or, as it is the case here, a mirror. The potential and function are held within this valuable gangue braided bands. The object stripped of its use leaves its mark on the case, as a witness, as a final attempt to reflect and implementation abyme, a final attempt of expression. The view point changes, neutralized, diverted, it detaches from the body to cross the border to infinity. Not without resistance. The protective case is an ambivalent prison, porous and sealed, talkative and silent.

Jan MANČUŠKA’s works start out from the principle that our apprehension of reality is subjective. It is based on cognitive processes, subject to psychological disturbances or distortions linked to the interpretative sensory approach that we have to reality. This fact places us in a paradoxical situation in relation to the question of the visible and the non visible. If we think that our senses are no more objective that anything that can come out of the imagination, then it makes no difference, the vision can be passed on by some other mode of perception, maybe more indirect, such as reading a descriptive text. This is the case of While I walked…, 2005, where a ribbon in textile with the impression of a text and attached at several points of the room’s walls, invites us a walking around the thread of a story. The text gets its meaning precisely from the direction it would have us walk in, for there is often a parallel between what we read and where in space we are reading. So it is up to readers to be physically in line with what passes before their eyes, sometimes mistaking their own thoughts for thoughts that turn out to be the narrator’s inner dialogue. Ján Mancuska tests the resistance or otherwise of this narrow margin, this porous chink existing between narrative fiction, imagination and reality.

Mark MANDER's work Hallway with Sentences, 1999-2003 consists of a series of words / sentences made of adhesive letters arranged in a diagonal of about 30 degrees to 60 centimeters from each other. It comes from the book Colored Room with Black and White Scene, which includes a selection of around seventy words alphabetically arranged, ordered in order to form as many sentences as possible. This inventory can then be adjusted according to circumstances and states, by adding a selection of these "key phrases" which will issue a virtual Following rhymes and phrases whose addition form a constantly undulating text between fiction and description.

In the works he has produced in recent years, Matthew McCaslin has used video as a way of incorporating the time factor within the sensory experience of sculpture. It was in 1987 at PS1 in New York City, for an installation called Sixteen on Center, that Matthew McCaslin first used the aluminium structures that are used to make sheetrock walls. Like his previous works, the work played on a feeling of incompleteness. You were at a loss to know if the work were finished, half-finished, in progress, or had been abandoned. It was in those same years that the building construction jobs that Matthew McCaslin took on to make a living started to become part and parcel of his artistic work. A Walk Threw the Woods (2002) creates an environment using the same aluminium tracks that were used for Sixteen on Center. Just as he reveals the presence of flows and wires behind the electrical equipment in his early works, here it is the structure of the walls, and their framework, which is uncovered. The walls are invisible, and it becomes possible to pass through them, and even live in them. They follow on, one behind the other, in parallel, based on an absurd plan. Left deconstructed, they suggest a dense but open space, like undergrowth. A video projection accompanies the work. It shows a tree that two men are gradually covering with strips of paper, tracing a ghostlike silhouette, while the soundtrack broadcasts the noise of a brisk wind.

Bach Whistled (1970) is an original sound piece in the work of Adrian Piper, and one of her earliest art productions. This work on Bach describes Adrian Piper’s musical training—piano lessons and musicology classes at university. As a conceptual artist, and erstwhile student of Sol LeWitt, Adrian Piper is interested in the arithmetical aspect of music. Bach Whistled is real performance, no less. The piece lasts 45 minutes. And these minutes are taxing. It is not just sound and space that are presented here. Adrian Piper’s gradually exhausted and breathless body is just as present as Bach’s music. This powerful presence of the artist, by way of his own body’s involvement, gives rise to immediate reactions in viewers: a desire to accompany her and know if she will hold out right to the end. The spectator must be immediately touched. This is what Adrian Piper calls “indexing the present”, otherwise put, not using just an elitist art language. There must be a direct contact, prior to any kind of prejudice or judgement.

These different densities of the present offered by the works in the show The Eventual are so many ways of asserting the work as a way of being in the world, through the different forms in which narrative and performance have been redeployed, after the radical breaks of the 1970s, less for their aesthetic dimension than for the way in which they address the spectator.

In cooperation with: Frac Bourgogne, Dijon (FR) The Frac Bourgogne is supported by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication (DRAC: Regional Direction of Cultural Affairs of Burgundy), the Burgundy Regional Council (FR) and the General Council of Côte-d'Or (FR). This project (curator: Eva González-Sancho, director of the Frac Bourgogne) is supported by the Maison de Bourgogne in Prague (CZ) and by the European and International Direction of the Burgundy Regional Council (FR). Partner for the loan of Ján Mančuška work "While I walked..., 2005" : Frac Lorraine, Metz (FR)

The year-round exhibition plan of FUTURA is supported by: the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, Prague City Hall

Principal media partners:
Radio Wave, Umělec, Flash Art

Media partners:
Radio 1, Artyčok.tv, Atelier, Pragueout

Thanks to:
Imarmitaliani