Pure Waste, Biennale 1.618, Carreau du Temple

The Pure Waste exhibition, the fifth carte blanche entrusted to COAL by the 1.618 biennial, brings together the works of international artists who, by sublimating waste, pay homage to the preciousness, humble and necessary of the material, in order to question visitors about the challenges of today.

Oceans of plastics, food waste, disposable material, scraps accumulating endlessly in our garbage cans, on our sidewalks; anthropized nature, electronic carcasses, toxic waste, polluted resources, polluting that pile up everywhere on the planet… These images, which have travelled around the world, haunt us, but without changing our behavior or that of our industries. Yet in our limited world, every bit of matter is a resource, which if thought of and considered as such, can be used optimally as it is in nature, becoming the raw material of something else, in a continuum where the notion of waste does not exist.

The artists of Pure Waste deceive the gaze, magnify, reveal the potentials and qualities of the neglected material, dismantle by the absurd the industry of false solutions and greenwashing, and try to reverse the cycle of destruction. The toxic or disposable material becomes forest again, the objects are returned to their essential or unexpected functions, and our convictions, them, crack, suddenly become as ephemeral as the screen of our iPhone…

With : Mandy Barker, Aliza Eliazarov, Benjamin Gaulon, Laurent Gongora, Eva Jospin, Lor K, Le Nouveau Ministère de l’Agriculture, Mathilde Pellé, Stéfane Perraud and Aram Kebaddjian, Benjamin Sabatier

Curator: COAL, Lauranne Germond, and Phoebe-Lin Elnan

Dates: May 31 – June 3, 2018