Ève Chabanon : The Surplus

BÉTONSALON – CENTRE D’ART ET DE RECHERCHE, Paris

29 January 2020 – 25 April 2020

Curated by Mélanie Bouteloup

In January 2020, Bétonsalon – Center for Art and Research pre­sents The Surplus, Ève Chabanon’s first solo exhi­bi­tion in France. It is orga­nized around the eco­nomic notion of « sur­plus », a term that refers to the dif­fer­ence between the amount a person would be willing to accept for a good, com­pared to what they can receive by selling it at the market price. The exhi­bi­tion comes at a time when Ève Chabanon’s artistic prac­tice is being rede­fined, as she has so far been involved in long-term pro­jects involving marginal­ized ter­ri­to­ries and com­mu­ni­ties to create spaces for dia­logue and cre­ation. It con­sti­tutes both an inven­tory, a con­clu­sion and a step aisde from the arbores­cent pro­ject The Surplus of the non-pro­ducer, started by Ève Chabanon in 2016, which chal­lenges the notion of « sur­plus » to attribute it to those whom the artist calls «non-pro­ducers»: artists, crafts­people or pro­fes­sionals in exile and set­tled in the Paris region who, for eco­nomic, legal and admin­is­tra­tive rea­sons, struggle to accom­plish their prac­tices.

Starting from the con­tra­dic­tions inherent in col­lab­o­ra­tive logics, the artist imag­ines an instal­la­tion based on a series of func­tional and sculp­tural ceramic objects that blend dif­ferent shapes, texts and images. Made avail­able for sale during the exhi­bi­tion, these objects ques­tion notions of value, economy and arti­sanal pro­duc­tion in rela­tion to which all visual artists nec­es­sarily define them­selves. This spec­u­la­tion around objects and words, at the same time fic­tional, emo­tional and poetic, allows the artist to define her own sur­plus.

Ève Chabanon (1989, France) lives and works in Brussels. She grad­u­ated from the Haute École des Arts du Rhin (HEAR) in Strasbourg in 2013, before com­pleting a Master’s Degree in Curating at the Sorbonne Université, Paris in 2014 and taking part in the Open School East in London and Margate in 2016. She has under­taken res­i­den­cies at the White House in Dagenham in 2017, at the FRAC Grand Large in Dunkirk in 2018 and at Te Whare Hēra, Wellington, New Zealand in 2019, fol­lowing which her first solo exhi­bi­tion, Eating Each Other, was held. She was awarded the Sciences Po prize for con­tem­po­rary art in 2018 for her pro­ject The Anti-Social Social Club: Episode One, The Chamber of the Dispossessed. Her work has been exhib­ited in La Manutention, a per­for­mance pro­gram at the Palais de Tokyo in 2018, and in group shows such as The Stratagems of the Intellect at Parc Saint Léger in 2016, The center cannot holdat Lafayette Anticipations in 2018 and take (a)back the economy at the CAC Chanot, Clamart in 2019.