MOHABIT - Alexandre Bavard

About

Beginning with a monthlong residency based out of the Humbolthain Club, the Parisian Artist, Alexandre Bavard quickly turned to the neglected landscapes of Berlin, welcoming the city and its streets into his practice. The sites of so-called neo-archeologia; a torn down theatre in Moabit and an abandoned military base in Eberswalde proved suitable sites with which to influence and frame the exhibition that reflects Bavard’s background in graffiti whilst commenting on the intersections of his practice and the importance of collaboration.

Similarly to the way in which impressionist painters took their easels on their backs and out through the streets of Paris, looking for suitable sites or appropriate scenes of inspiration, Bavard walks the streets of every city to find these sites that evoke attraction to a certain social and cultural phenomena; the wasteland.

At the core of Bavard’s practice we find exploration, romantic curiosity and baroudeur-ism; from uncovering the abandoned sites of architectural chaos in dystopian pockets of Berlin, the so-called Wasteland of a city (that we often choose to overlook) becomes a central focus of MOHABIT. Bavard unitises his ability to orchestrate objects or sculptures of the ready-made in a ‘white-cube’ gallery setting, the three-part installation and assemblage sculptural works, activate the key sense of exposure in the audience’s experience and activate the juxtaposition of extra-ordinary materials.

It would be difficult to overlook the gentle nod towards 80s science fiction-esque aesthetic, the dystopian sculptures and overall landscape of the exhibition embodies that which Alexandre Bavard links to his fascination with the likes of Andrei Tarkovsky’s sci-fi film ‘Stalker’, a world where its protagonist guides people to the “Zone”, an unnamed location where undisturbed remnants lie amongst the ruins. Alexandre Bavard cleverly isolates the gallery as a performance space, baron wasteland and a curated experience; where the audience is guided through an unnamed zone that evokes a feeling of decaying past, present and future.

2021, is marked as a year of lockdown; the isolation, curfew and quarantine experience are abandoned in Alexandre Bavard’s MOHABIT exhibition. As the artist himself courageously states “Fuck the lockdown. Long live the taggers.”

The show will be activated Friday 11th of June 2021 at 8.30pm with a performance by Maeva Berthelot.

This exhibition is dedicated to Daniel Weissbach.

Text by Emily Hickin
Soundtrack by Vonverhille (maturre)
Art handling by Adrien Jolivet