Announcing the 2024 Étant donnés Grantees

From September 4, 2024 – June 6, 2025, the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, Florida will present an exhibition by German-born, Paris-based artist Ulla von Brandenburg. 

Von Brandenburg’s projects draw on a wide range of subjects, including occultism, psychoanalysis, modernist architecture, and Hollywood cinema, in contemporary contexts.  

Ulla von Brandenburg: In Dialogue is a presentation of the artist’s work paired with The Bass’s recently acquired ceramic mural by the Lebanese-American artist Etel Adnan (1925–2021). A leading figure in contemporary Arab-American visual art and literature, Adnan created rich, geometric fields of color in her paintings and drawings, some translated into large-scale murals and tapestries that reflect the artist’s enduring interest in architecture and the built environment. Comparatively, von Brandenburg’s multifaceted practice combines film, textiles, drawings, watercolors and sound into immersive exhibition scenarios where the different art forms harmonize into a cohesive whole (or Gesamtkunstwerk).  

The exhibition explores this cross-generational engagement with geometric abstraction—its interplay of circles, squares and triangles—evident in both Adnan’s mural and von Brandenburg’s practice, and staged alongside the rich history of the Russian-French artist Sonia Delaunay. Here, Adnan’s lyrical abstract mural (Untitled, 2023), at 14 × 21 feet, serves as both a protagonist and theatrical backdrop in von Brandenburg’s exhibition scenography. The works interweave through the language of abstraction and the artists’ shared interests in the social and spatial environment. 

Conceived and written by Vanessa Selk and Louisa Marajo, Tallahassee’s Tout-Monde Art Foundation will present Homo Sargassum, a film, exhibition, and program that addresses the concerning proliferation of Sargassum seaweed on Caribbean coasts since 2011. French participants in the show include Minia Biabiany, Ronald Cyrille, Nicolas Derné, Guy Gabon, Gwladys Gambie, Mirtho Linguet, Louisa Marajo, and Ricardo Ozier-Lafontaine. This project invites artists, scientists, scholars, and bio-tech experts to share their perspectives on the subject and is open to curatorial collaborations to further investigate the issue. The narrative unfolds in three different episodes that tell the journey of the Sargassum:

I. DRIFTING: Sargassum is a seaweed initially found in the waters of West Africa and the Sargasso Sea near Florida. Acting as a natural refuge and habitat for marine life, it migrates through the Atlantic Ocean in a symbolic movement that recalls the Middle Passage.

II. BREATHING FIRE: In the Americas, pollution, and the use of fertilizers have led to the concerning proliferation of Sargassum, which strands on Caribbean coasts in massive quantities. The decay of Sargassum releases toxic gases that impact both humans and entire ecosystems. Public authorities, private companies, and artists have sought to address this issue, viewing Sargassum as a new opportunity by transforming it into paper, cosmetics, clothes, and artworks.

III. BECOMING FLUID: The anthropocentric approach to the Sargassum scourge is unsatisfactory. Thus, the audience is invited to symbolically dive into the marine womb, learning how to breathe underwater again and merging with the seaweed to become a Homo Sargassum in a new spiritual and organic symbiosis and understanding.

More information can be found here.

Like Night Needs Morning is American artist Anthony Cudahy’s first exhibition at an art center in France. His work was recently shown in the exhibition conversation at the Fine Arts Museum of Dole (FR) (2023), where they were placed in relation to the museum collections.

At CAP, the internationally-renowned artist brings together a body of work specifically conceived for the exhibition. The art center’s space features a series of twenty-four large format drawings, exhibited alongside a selection of paintings, a video, and a wide selection of the artist’s fanzines and self-publications.

The exhibition is the opportunity to highlight a founding aspect of the artist’s practice: publishing, and more specifically, self-publishing. These productions are often the result of collaborations with friends, lovers, or artists in his circle, who are both subjects and sometimes co-authors of these objects. The artist’s interest in the archives that nourish his practice is the thread linking the works presented in the exhibition.

If we were able to glance in Anthony Cudahy’s studio in Brooklyn, we would see its walls covered with black-and-white images taken from art history books, hung alongside fragments of photographs of Renaissance paintings or images from his personal life. These include snapshots or portraits of his community of friends and artists, photographs from his uncle’s archive, fragments of motifs from medieval bestiaries, or antique tapestries. Anthony Cudahy’s work is rich in references to history and art history, yet the artist is also a dramatist of the ordinary. His works are an ode to intimacy, solitude, desire, eroticism, life, and death. Mythical or transfigured flowers, faces, bodies, and embraces emerge in his drawings and the subjects are frozen in bright, vibrant colors.

Confluence by Marie Lorenz explores the notions of common goods and places. Observing the relationships between an environment and the organisms that inhabit it, the artist sees her subjects as fellow travelers, from whom it is possible to move reality towards poetics. She adopts an anthropological posture of “participant observation [through which] the correspondence, whether with people or with other things, is a labour of giving back what we owe to the human and non-human beings with which and with whom we share our world, for our own existence and formation.” By surveying territories, she produces new narratives like a storyteller.

The exhibition highlights the urgent need to reappropriate controversial subjects in a sensitive and cultural way, while preserving the dissensus they imply. Indeed, “[artists’] interpretations are themselves real changes when they transform the forms of visibility of a common world and, with them, the capacities that any bodies can exercise on a new common landscape.” So, these goods and places of the common are as much sources of inspiration as they are tools with which to reflect on the complex and delicate relationships we maintain with our territories, our histories, our ecosystems, our habitat, and our fellow human beings.

Iván Argote’s Dinosaur recognizes the seemingly prosaic figure of the pigeon and celebrates its anonymity amongst the urban landscape, while also taking aim at classic monuments erected in honor of great men, who all too often are neither honorable nor great. Argote humorously suggests that, in fact, the not-tame, but no longer wild birds are likely more deserving of being placed on a pedestal and celebrated for their contributions to society than most. Further, by highlighting their origins, Argote reminds viewers that, to some degree, everyone is an immigrant. Even the pigeon, a New York fixture, migrated there and made the city their home, like millions of other “native” New Yorkers.

Dinosaur, like the pigeons that inspired it, bears witness to the city’s evolution, and confronts us with our ever-changing relationship with the natural world and its inhabitants. Pigeons, the oft-overlooked and derided creatures that seem to over-populate the city, first arrived in the United States via Europe, likely in the 1800s. They were used for food, kept as pets, and presented as symbols of beauty and wealth based on their plumage, but above all, they were used as reliable message carriers. Pigeons have an internal navigational mechanism — known as “homing” — that allows them to always find their way back home. This skill made the bird indispensable in war—they were used as military messengers in both World War I and World War II, saving hundreds of soldiers’ lives by transporting messages quickly to both the trenches and front lines. Many of these pigeons received gallantry awards and were celebrated as war heroes, before technology eventually rendered them obsolete.

Argote is the first Plinth artist from the global south, and the youngest yet. His work as an artist and filmmaker is heavily focused on social justice issues and historical processes, sometimes inspired by his childhood in Bogotá, as he grew up in a family with a long tradition of political and social activism, from the 1950s to the present.

Overshare is the first exhibition in North America to explore the range and depth of artist Sophie Calle’s (France, b. 1953) practice across the past five decades. Through examples of major bodies of work as well as lesser-known pieces, the exhibition captures Calle’s astute probing into the human condition and reveals ways that her early work anticipated the rise of social media as a space to create and share oneself. The presentation features photography, video, installations, and text-based works, highlighting the artist’s virtuosic use of different media to explore broadly recognizable and emotionally resonant themes. 

Calle’s works often combine photographs, videos, texts, and objects to examine the complex nature of relationships, whether between partners, friends, family, or strangers. She actively erodes the boundaries between private and public space, thereby both bringing the audience into moments of personal intimacy as well as hinging on our voyeuristic preoccupations with other people’s lives. Across her career, Calle has continued to explore the dynamics inherent to relationships–love, trust, suspicion, intimacy, and power–and ways in which those forces also condition our sense and outward portrayal of our own identities. Her works feel particularly pressing and salient today as we continue to navigate the intractable presence of the digital realm in our lives. 

For this project, four artists are invited to think about the Polyspheres, an extension of Marie de Brugerolle’s research called “Post-Performance Future.” In dialogue with artworks from the collection of the Frac (Marie Bourget’s among others), this atelier is an invitation for artists with different styles, backgrounds, and nationalities to reaffirm the roundness of the words (and of the world).

Through these interplays of spheres: social, physics, and politics, from the inside to outside, micro/macro, representation/illusion, and by blending forms and poetry, the 2024 International Workshops will be a true ode to language, to the geometry of the round, as a geometrical form, shape, and sound. Bubbles, spirals, and snowballs will punctuate the space as ongoing open monads.

Vicious Circles will be the first exhibition in the United States dedicated to artist Jacqueline de Jong (b.1939, Hengelo, Netherlands, d. 2024, Amsterdam, Netherlands). The exhibition will consider the perpetual theme of war and protest within the artist’s oeuvre; whether in paintings dedicated to the rebellious spirit of rock ‘n’ roll, or haunting portrayals of the ongoing war in Ukraine, De Jong remained focused on the present, reacting to the now. Vicious Circles questions how the present relates to history, and the ways in which De Jong’s decades of engagement with current events forces viewers to confront the harsh reality of humanity’s endless repetition of violent trauma, and the critical nature of art as a form of resistance.

The exhibition also addresses De Jong’s legacy as a key figure within the history of counterculture publishing, highlighting her role as editor, publisher, and designer of the quintessential artist-led magazine, The Situationist Times (1962-67). This six-volume, multilingual periodical was created by a group of artists who sought to disrupt cultural hierarchies and academic disciplines, with an emphatic dedication to creating situations of societal subversion. Up until the final moments of her recent passing, De Jong remained an outstanding female leader within a male-dominated network, and her place in history is distinguished by her critical contributions to the avant-garde throughout her life.

The show takes its title from a painting within De Jong’s mid-1960s series, Private Lives of Cosmonauts. In this body of work, the artist took on the subject of the Cold War and what came to be known as The Space Race. The image juxtaposes the interior experience of an astronaut with the grand historical narrative of man’s entry into the cosmos. The candy-colored, spiral composition plays with the fantastical notion of looking down upon the hubbub of the world from a whirling, zero-gravity perspective. Among the revelry, however, is the underlying threat of nuclear destruction that defined the Cold War era. Nothing can be taken at face value in the art of De Jong; duality is always at play, humor and solemnity must coexist.

A group of newly commissioned sculptures and a video work come together in this immersive installation by Marguerite Humeau (b.1986, France), reflecting her practice at the intersection of speculative exploration and cultural analysis. Influenced by the looming shadow of the climate crisis, the works draw upon deep research and the artist’s interest in existential philosophies and mythologies to speculate on the future of humanity and our ecosystems.

Paris-based artist Julien Creuzet’s (b. 1986, Le Blanc Mesnil, France) practice encompasses moving images, dance, poetry, and sound, tethered by a sculptural materiality that hovers between the organic and inorganic. Plastic and natural fiber nets, ropes, and wires are woven into forms that both allude to and evade familiarity, connecting across gallery spaces in bold, nearly toxic colors. This work is an act of accretion, a building of layers in both the physical construction of the objects and the archipelagic installation design. The sonic dimensions are equally dense, drawing from histories of jazz and other musical forms of the African diaspora. Debris collected from the streets of Paris and beyond is recontextualized to reference his intimate relationship with the sea and his Martinician heritage. The country’s precarity within the global climate crises and the centrality of post-coloniality and Blackness propel Cruezet’s work into a US-based conversation where it is both an urgent and necessary contribution.

Initiated in 2020 as a co-commissioned exhibition between The Bell and Le Magasin – Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble and its new director, Céline Kopp, the Venice Biennale announcement evolved the project into the US presentation of Creuzet’s French pavilion (curated solely by Kopp and London-based Cindy Sissokho) at The Bell in the spring of 2025. In Venice, Creuzet expands his sculptural practice while introducing new forms of environmental affect. Visitors flow through a mist of humid, perfumed air and around basins filled with aquatic vegetation. Oceanic deities dance on massive LED screens, having crossed the Atlantic Ocean centuries before and journeyed back to the waters of Venice. Immersive music amplifies the project’s emotional resonance of loss and resistance, an act of recuperation and celebration of Afro-diasporic systems of knowledge, beliefs, and philosophies.

Creuzet’s practice has long critiqued legacies of colonialism, and his challenge to the architecture and history of the French pavilion extends to Brown University’s campus and its centrality within the Black Atlantic. Brown sits directly on the Providence River, the site where the largest number of enslaved Africans entered the Thirteen Colonies. Originally triangulated with Africa and the Caribbean, the shipping industry of Rhode Island evolved to be deeply enmeshed with the US cotton industry as the region became a center of textile production. Creuzet is fascinated by the watery connection between Venice, Martinique, and Providence, conceptualizing the migration of the pavilion across an Atlantic marked by material and cultural histories that have long informed his work. The presentation at Brown will be of a different viscosity, so to speak, an adaptation to our waterways and colonial thematics that dominate the campus and loom large across the region.

Over the past thirty years, Ange Leccia has created many films and videos focused on war – World War II, the French Indochina War, and the war in Mali. For the exhibition Ghosts of War, he will create a new film in Ukraine in November 2024 about the current war and its impact on society, not only in Ukraine but also in France. Leccia plans to rely on drones to capture the horrors of the bombed small villages and cities in eastern Ukraine using his stylistic directorial vision. The film will be screened as a large-scale video installation at The Ukrainian Museum along with two older war-themed films – Visage Hermes (2018) and Ô Superman (2016) – which have never been exhibited in the USA and will also be presented as video installations. Additionally, The Ukrainian Museum is partnering with the Cooper Union to showcase one of the video works, which will be projected outside on the building itself. The museum is also in dialogue with Times Square Arts to showcase the newly commissioned film during the run of the exhibition.

Ange Leccia’s artistic practice mainly focuses on images of departure, cycle, transmission, and reception to highlight the meeting points between two things, favoring a slowing down of our perception. Deeply fascinated by technology as the mark of his time, the artist describes himself as a “manipulator of the obvious” and expands his field of investigation in line with technical progress, while conceptually opposing the idea of fabrication. Leccia’s exhibitions always have a feeling of fragility, between the simplicity of the objects presented and the often-spectacular technical devices.

This exhibition aims to foster a deeper contemplative dialogue through ongoing and concurrent community outreach initiatives. The educational programs will include a round-table discussion and feature a lecture by French curator Jérôme Sans. It is particularly appropriate that a major video installation exhibition of Ange Leccia’s is organized at this time at The Ukrainian Museum. The exhibition, along with its public projects and learning events, will demonstrate Leccia’s cohesive artistic vision and his commitment to exploring the topic of war and the active role of artists in society.

The exhibition Like Water, on view at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAM) from March 7 to August 10, 2025, includes a multigenerational group of artists working in the US and abroad. Organized by CAM’s Ferring Foundation Chief Curator Dean Daderko, Like Water centers artworks that address water’s life-giving and destructive powers, floods (of emotion), the Middle Passage, climate change, leakiness, and paths of (least) resistance, among other subjects. The exhibition is part of an ongoing exhibition series entitled The Weather Inside that considers a landscape as a material, physical condition and as an interior, emotional state.

“Hypothetical Summer: Scénographie 1 (FR)” focuses on the political dimensions of scénographie and its renewed relevance as a nuanced method of exhibition contextualization. Scénographie is a unique part of the soft infrastructure of contemporary art institutions in that it facilitates the flow of ideas–a malleable support structure for artists, curators, and the public. Park Myers’ research trip will be centered around how scénographie engenders agency within and democratizes contemporary art experiences in the context of specific French exhibition practices. A culminating report will outline institutional methodologies for incorporating scenographic practices from case studies and potential collaborators titled “Scaffolding Scénographic Incorporation – French Perspectives.” 

This grant supports a research trip to Paris from November 4-11, 2024, organized in preparation for  Expand and Contract: The Salon, to be held at the Los Angeles Center of Photography (LACP) gallery in Downtown Los Angeles, CA in June 2025. 

During the research trip, Rozental will attend Paris Photo, meet with galleries, conduct studio visits, and connect with local arts organizers and producers.  These in-person meetings will be instrumental for the next phases of the project and the cultural exchange between Europe and the US that is at its core. 

Through mixed media, Expand and Contract touches upon issues of social inequity and marginalization, as well as their impact on geographical and emotional landscapes. Seeking to address disparities experienced by photographers internationally and locally, the curated exhibition will include projects by galleries and unrepresented artists from Paris and Los Angeles, and will focus on experimental photographic practice. 

External conditions – climate, light, heat, cold, and location – may change materials into something new and unexpected. Expand and Contract considers photographic practice in similar terms, exploring how the melding (or separation) of various materials and perspectives may shift our sensorial experience. The focus of the exhibition on experimental photography reflects a growing interest among the global photographic community, to immerse in and expand further ways to think about, experience, and understand our relationship with images. Bringing together diverse group of artists from Europe and across the US, this exhibition explores photography beyond traditional definitions, whether those are reflected in the creative process, or in the presentation of the work in the gallery.