Joëlle De La Casinière: Absolument Nécessaire

About

International Project Space is pleased to present the first exhibition by French artist Joëlle de La Casinière (b. 1944) in the UK. Absolument nécessaire (The Emergency Book) brings together various aspects of Casinière's diverse body of work spanning over 40 years, including text and book projects, collage, sound, film and video. The exhibition takes its title from Casinière's first book, published in 1973 by Les Editions de Minuit in Paris, a unique graphic manuscript made during and after a period of travelling in South America. Moving fluidly between poetry texts and image Absolument nécessaire is at once travel diary, sketchbook, script and graphic novel; Deleuze and Guattari championed it in A Thousand Plateaus, calling it a ‘truly nomadic book'. La première partie du roi Henri IV de double V Shakespeare: une analogie, is a filmic extension of the book shot around a group of artists attempting to stage Shakespeare's Henry IV using the inhabitants of a small town in Columbia as actors. Marrying image, sound and text, the film, like the book, opens up a space in which no one element of information is given priority. The ‘Tablotins' are an ongoing series of collages that Casinière has produced throughout her career. Composed through handwriting and drawing and found images including stickers, advertising, photographs and postcards they layer personal references and critical commentaries on the mass media. Hanging side by side in large numbers, Casinière describes them as an ‘impossible book'. The Tablotins will be accompanied by a selection of films made by Casinière and a group of artists known as the Montfaucon Research Centre. These films borrow the language of television broadcasts in order to critique the medium itself and many were commissioned by and broadcast on mainstream French and Belgian television networks in the 1980s. A new presentation of the book Absolument nécessaire, devised specially for this exhibition, will be the first in a new series of displays and projects running alongside the main exhibitions programme. The Reading Room, playing with the form of a gallery bookshop, will be a space for the presentation of artist and curatorial projects which interrogate the notion of publishing in its most expanded form, investigating the ways in which knowledge is produced and made public in the 21st century