Jan Kopp

The monumental installation Grand ensemble has taken over virtually the entire space. This rhizomic work comprises hundreds of stalk-shaped objects: sticks, branches, broom handles, curtain rods, bike pumps, telescopic antennas, rulers, tubes, etc.

Collected from Rennes residents before the exhibition, these objects are seen by the artist as «“personal measuring devices” taken from different points in the city of Rennes and making up a geography or imaginary network given concrete form by being temporarily assembled in the Art Centre.1» The only limits to the expansion of the work, as it evolves randomly according to what is collected, are its robustness and the room available inside the Art Centre.

A collective – or at least participatory – work, Grand Ensemble reveals some of the artist’s ongoing concerns, including making together and living together. The objects rounded up here are intersecting, intermingling, individual stories, a kind of visual variation on George Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual.

In the small exhibition room we can watch an assemblage of videos of several artists involved, last spring, in the Lebanese phase of the Suspended Spaces project.

Kopp is an active member of the project and here we see him running through the site of Oscar Niemeyer’s unfinished Permanent International Fair in Tripoli. This film is typical of the issues tackled by Kopp’s exhibition and, more broadly, of his work to come as associate artist during the Courir les Rues season: perspective and horizon lines, the utopian as against the conflictual city, and junctions, interchanges and transmission.