Der Ring
Opening reception 12th. OCT 2019
Show runs until 3rd. NOV 2019
curated by Pauline Baumont and Sylvain Menétrey
With:
Saâdane Afif, Jean-Baptiste Bouvet, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Emilie Ding, Claude Eigan, Julie Favreau, Paul Ferens, Charlotte Herzig, Clémence de La Tour du Pin, Xavier Mazzarol, Adrien Missika, Aude Pariset, Antoine Renard, Ramaya Tegegne, Niels Trannois
The Asian-owned clothes and cheap jewellery wholesalers left altogether the Popincourt neighbourhood, in the centre of Paris, for the suburbs a few years ago. This move has opened one of the last non-gentrified areas of the city to commercial diversification. The artist-run-space Artemis Fontana is located in one of these abandoned shops, where it runs not-for-profit activities economically unconceivable elsewhere in Paris. It is situated in a deadlock of the globalized market of art and retail. The presentation of artists’ jewelleries fantasizes a reciprocity with the capitalisation movement of luxury houses, which invests in art, and whose products are copied, reproduced and counterfeited by the Chinese mass production industries. These loops and spirals adorn the contemporary modes of exchange. One of them is the migration wave of artists to a low-cost libertarian European capital and the comeback of their productions in a gentrified neighbourhood during an international art fair sponsored by a high-end jeweller.
The exhibition Der Ringshowcases pieces of jewellery created by 15 French-speaking artists based in Berlin, with whom the curators have mixed. The exhibition’s problematic is located in the question of relation. The relation between the skin and the jewellery, be it symbolical, erotic or dysfunctional. The partially re-enacted modernist relationship between the patron and the artist, exemplified by Peggy Guggenheim, for whom Alexander Calder created earrings. The political, economic and desire relation art is part of, that precious and more humble jewelleries hyperbolically emphasize.
A catalogue was produced specifically for the show. It contains a photo shooting of all the works worn by the curators and close friends of Artemis Fontana.
Sylvain Menétrey
XAVIER MAZZAROL 
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