Downtown, Los Angeles
Gaëlle Choisne
Temple of Love—Adorable
The Mistake RoomGaëlle Choisne, one of the most compelling new voices in contemporary art to emerge from France, presents Adorable, a new iteration in Temple of Love, the artist’s ongoing exploration of love as an unsettling and disruptive political form. This exhibition is in conversation with the music of modernist Haitian composer Carmen Brouard, who trained in France, and eventually came to live in Montreal, Canada. Her time spent on both sides of the Atlantic greatly informed the syncretic vision of modernity that she expressed through her compositions, which at The Mistake Room will be performed within the exhibition by a pianist and violinist from the Colburn School in Los Angeles. Herself a person of Haitian-descent, Choisne’s sculptural installation embraces the chance, intimacy, and processes of creolization found in Brouard’s music to create an architectural space shaped by, and conducive to, the un-forming and irreducible effects of love. Temple of Love—Adorable is the second exhibition of Histories of a Vanishing Present, The Mistake Room’s 2019-2020 curatorial cycle, which explores, through postmemory, how a generation of artists born at the cusp of the global turn inherit pasts that don’t directly belong to them. For these artists, identity is not bound solely to biology, history, or geography but rather is sited in situationally specific processes of negotiation. Adorable focuses on love’s power to undo our sense of self, both calling-out and confounding the self-justifying logic of identity which claims: “I do x things, because I am x”. As French philosopher Roland Barthes puts it: “The adorable is what is adorable… I love you because I love you.” Indeed, love can take us to a similarly tautological space as identity, yet— at least in Choisne’s practice— it disrupts logics of causation by instead reveling in confusion and pleasure. Gaëlle Choisne: Temple of Love—Adorable is organized by The Mistake Room and curated by Kris Kuramitsu, TMR Deputy Director and Head of Program. Gaëlle Choisne (1985, France) graduated from the National School of Fine Arts of Lyon. In January 2017, she was admitted into the Rijksakademie, after a one-year residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris. Her work has been featured in biennials, group shows and workshops, such as at the Beirut Art Center for the 13th Sharjah Biennial (2017), MAC Lyon (2016), the Lyon Biennial (2015) and the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (2018). Temple of Love is her first institutional solo show. The artist addresses the issues of disaster, the exploitation of resources and the remains of colonialism in dynamic installations which mutate their environment. She unravels these themes through a series of workshops with school students in Port-au-Prince (Haiti) and is currently focusing on a project involving the manipulation of raw materials to elaborate socially and environmentally-conscious urbanism methods.