Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc:
Mefloquine Dreams
MKK 1 - Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt
19 November 2016 - 8. January 2017
The exhibition is being sponsored by Baloise Group
Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt
Website: mmk-frankfurt.de
Mefloquine Dreams
MKK 1 - Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt
19 November 2016 - 8. January 2017
Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Sector IX B, 2015
Filmstill, Courtesy of the Artist
© Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc
The French artist Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc (b. in 1977, lives and works in Rome) is the recipient of the 17th Baloise Art Prize, which has been awarded to emerging artists every year since 1999. In conjunction with the award presentation, Abonnenc’s work Sector IX B (2015) will be on view in an exhibition at the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, and will enter the museum’s collection as a gift from the Baloise Group.
With the Baloise Art Prize, the Baloise Group enables the young recipients to continue their work with the aid of the prize purse, while also – by means of the associated purchases and donations – offering them a platform for the presentation of their art.
Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Sector IX B, 2015
Filmstill, Courtesy of the Artist
© Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc
Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Sector IX B, 2015
Filmstill, Courtesy of the Artist
© Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc
Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc received the prize for a workgroup bearing a relation to a broadly-based research endeavour on a collection of ethnographic objects. The gift – the film Sector IX B (2015) – is one element of that workgroup, which has not yet been carried to completion. To develop his multifaceted œuvre of film, photography, drawings and sculpture, the artist takes as his point of departure extensive research on artefacts of colonial and post-colonial history. They serve him as representatives of complex global interrelationships and the impact of the latter on the construction of cultural identity.
The film forming the core of his presentation at the MMK 1 was first presented at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. It tells the fictive story of an ethnologist who, in the course of her research, begins to question the fundamental conditions of her discipline.
Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Sector IX B, 2015
Filmstill, Courtesy of the Artist
© Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc
Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc’s interest in the subject goes back to biographical research on a collection of ethnological objects belonging to his grandfather Émile Abonnenc, who served in Gabon and French Guiana in 1931 as a health commissioner and collected ethnological objects there. In order to expand their ethnographic collections back home in Europe, the administrations of the colonial powers urged their citizens who lived and worked abroad to collect artefacts. The latter, which were obtained in very different ways often impossible to reconstruct, are today found in many European museums. The routes by which they entered the colonial powers’ museum holdings thus inevitably provoke questions as to the extent to which modern scientific findings were linked with – and sponsored by – the respective colonial rule and its interests. With the aid of visual analyses of various colonial and post-colonial artefacts, Abonnenc’s work sheds light on the widely diverse relationships between past and present, and between personal and collective history.
The exhibition is being sponsored by Baloise Group
Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt
Website: mmk-frankfurt.de
