Review
Fareed Armaly has created an exhibition whose components appear minimal at first glance. It begins with three monitors on the entrance staircase, only two of which are running. It continues with a locked glass door in front of the actual exhibition hall, behind which stands a wooden frame placed in the center of the room — a frame with the same proportions as the glass door. In an adjacent room that resembles a neatly arranged workshop, four video monitors display long, gray corridors. A fifth monitor, by contrast, loops a scene from Cocteau’s film Orpheus, featuring a mirror — again, in the same proportions as the glass door. On a table, under glass, lie newspaper pages and texts about the events of May 1968.
But the elements are interconnected. The exhibition space is as sealed off as the concrete corridors normally hidden behind it, which are now suddenly made visible through video. One of the monitors on the entrance staircase shows a black-and-white film scene in which a man is trapped behind a glass door — the reverse of the situation encountered in front of the exhibition itself.
In the workshop, objects repeatedly appear in the fashionable orange of the late 1960s. The references jump back and forth between media and ideas — the longer one engages with the exhibition, the more frequent and coherent these connections become.
Fareed Armaly’s exhibition took place in the Maison de la Culture et de la Communication in Saint-Étienne. The building is a large cultural center with a theater, cinema, and library — whose planning and construction began before the student protests of May 1968, but which was not completed until after.