In Paris, most issues drifting within the water—say, within the Seine, or the Canal Saint-Martin—are none too poetic. However Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s calm set up offers a chic counterpoint: Clinamen v10, on view via September 21, swirls placidly under the resplendent rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce. A shallow basin painted swimming pool-blue, eighteen meters in diameter, is crammed with water by which white bowls float, guided by an invisible hydraulic water pump. Because the mild present propels the ceramics alongside, playfully jostling one another to create a faintly bell-like sound, serenity units in across the blithe sensorial soundscape. The bowls flow into not in visitors and never as if choreographed—they’re reminiscent, quite, of the type of languid repose of floating on one’s again. Curator Emma Lavigne, who can also be basic director of the Pinault Assortment, described it as a respite from “the stridency of the up to date world.”
She additional likened the floating bowls to a recent model of Claude Monet at Giverny with the proliferation of nymphéas (water lilies) bobbing within the water. Boursier-Mougenot described the bowls as evoking a flock of sheep.
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Clinamen, conceived in 2012, is proven right here at its largest iteration so far, at scale with the structure of this web site. The Bourse de Commerce was an 18th-century inventory trade, partly restored and partly redesigned throughout a significant three-year transformation by the hands of Japanese architect Tadao Ando. Its glass-domed rotunda and authentic wraparound Nineteenth-century mural are the venue’s crown jewels, under which is the core of the redesign, Ando’s huge and versatile 29-meter-wide, nine-meter-tall concrete cylindrical exhibition area. Staircases wrap round it, atop which guests can circle a ringed walkway to view the area from above.
The phrase “clinamen” comes from Epicurean physics and, per the wall textual content, “refers back to the random movement of atoms, an idea that resonates with the work’s inevitably altering and unpredictable nature.” (“Boursier-Mougenot has a weak point for overly intelligent titles,” Artnews as soon as wrote.)
Clinamen has been floating round, so to talk, since 1997 when Boursier-Mougenot performed round with filling up inflatable swimming pools. A ten-meter iteration was proven on the Biennale de Lyon in 2017, hosted in a geodetic constructing masterminded by Richard Buckminster Fuller; earlier than that, it was proven on the Nationwide Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne in 2013.
Boursier-Mougenot labored carefully with Lavigne ten years in the past, when she was a curator on the Centre Pompidou-Metz and he represented France on the 56th Venice Biennale. Within the Giardini, the artist used low-voltage electrical currents to energy a ‘cellular’ tree impressed by 18th-century parks and Italian Mannerist gardens. The artist had the French pavilion’s glass roof eliminated to freely permit within the components. The identical yr, his exhibition in Paris, “Acquaalta,” was named after the annual flooding that impacts the water ranges in Venice. His work not solely alluded to this phenomenon but additionally carried out it. When he took over areas within the Palais de Tokyo, darkish eerie waters unfurled throughout the cavernous rooms, via which guests navigated in small picket boats, whereas photographs of the general public themselves—filmed by cameras in situ—projected again their actions in opposition to the partitions.
Clinamen is posited as a type of synesthesia, the phenomenon of when the mind routes sensory data to multiple sense concurrently, and one can actually see timbres or hear visuals. Along with his relationship with water—the artist is predicated in Sète, a Mediterranean-adjacent French port metropolis within the Occitania area—Boursier-Mougenot has a powerful relationship with music, having additionally labored as a composer closely influenced by John Cage and Brian Eno, and Clinamen is a balm for the ears and eyes alike.
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