in the presence of the artists

This is a time of technological developments, of those that increase the potential for new discoveries. It is also the time of the resurgence of obscurantism and of a thinking that accredits “alternative facts”. To laziness and fear, the scientist, like the photographer, opposes an objective: to understand and experience the realities of the world and try to represent them.
The exhibition SCIENCE fictions explores the phenomenon of attractions exerted by science on contemporary photographic creation.

Quickly considered according to the formula of the astronomer Jules Janssen as the “retina of the scientist”, photography, itself the fruit of science, became the tool of choice for the scientific method, supplanting definitively at the end of the 19th century the illustration. From the 1920s onwards, viewed through the surrealist prism, scientific photography, until then considered impartial and irreproachable, revealed its poetic aura. If the attraction of the arts, and among them photography, for science is not new, it has experienced a new boom in recent years. The exhibition includes some of the most recent works on the subject, from the documentary approach and its poetic potential to the frank fictional exploration. It brings to light the parallel between the figure of the scientist, confronted with the need to represent his objects of study through laboratory experiments, and that of the photographer, seeking to make an image. Each of these singular works reminds us of the existence of the unfathomable mystery of our presence in the world and our perseverance in wanting to decipher it. Artistic creation joins scientific research there, posing as a fundamental principle the freedom to seek, the desire to understand.

With the works of : Berenice Abbott, Mustapha Azeroual, David Fathi, Robert Frank, Marina Gadonneix, Jos Jansen, Jan Köchermann, Nicolas Polli, Brea Souders, Patrick Tosani

And the collaboration of the galleries Binôme (Paris), Les Douches (Paris), Christophe Gaillard (Paris), Howard Greenberg (New York), Mathias Güntner (Hamburg), Fabienne Leclerc – IN SITU (Paris), the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston) as well as the research center Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY, Hamburg)

The exhibition was supported by Pro Helvetia and the Mondriaan Fund.

Photograph: Nicolas Polli, G-SEO with scientist, 1978. Ferox, The Forgotten Archive, 1976-2010

Free admission,
Information at 02 35 89 36 96
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