ART² will include more than 35 events (exhibitions, performances, talks, workshops, conferences) that will take place at 27 partner venues in New York City. On the occasion of this festival, 4 publications published by Les presses du réel – New York Series. ART² and its various components are organized around seven areas of investigation, curated by renowned art experts.

The Exhibition Machine, curated by Florence Ostende, looks at artists who are using the exhibition as both a medium and source material to create various occupations of space, temporality, and organizing principles, in order to challenge the spectacularization of experience and conventions of the event. This multifaceted project aims to focus on specific typologies that articulate the theoretical framework and structural mechanisms of exhibitions as potential artworks.

VENUES: The Artist’s Institute; CUNY - James Gallery; The Drawing Center; New Museum

By putting forward a series of provocations and re-castings of the space between materialism, idealism, and ways of working that are identifiable but not easily consumable, curator Fionn Meade has invited Paris-based castillo/corrales, a co-operatively run non-profit contemporary art venue, to organize a series of programs and events reflecting on The Issues of Our Time at Artists Space Books & Talks. The platform also includes a separate exhibition, Bibliothèque Tournante, exploring the life and work of Janette Laverrière (1909-2011), and concludes with a new performance From the Sky by London-based artist Laure Prouvost at Danspace Project.

VENUES: TWAAS; Artists Space Books and Talks; Columbia Maison Française; Danspace Project

This platform was conceived as a French-American exchange of perspectives centered on issues and themes that drive museums and private foundations alike. Several topics of reflection will be studied over the course of these two days of discussion: exhibiting collections, presenting new perspectives on art history, offering an artistic yet pedagogic program, producing new works and supporting the creation of contemporary art, and opening international axis museums in an effort to globalize a museum’s presence.

VENUES: Judd Foundation; Cultural Services of the French Embassy; Guggenheim; MoMA
 

The Nouveaux Commanditaires (in English, New Protocol) program is a socially engaged initiative created by the artist François Hers and supported by Fondation de France. This singular program arranges collaborations between three key players: the artist, the civil society, and the cultural mediator, with the involvement of public and private partners. Using the New Protocol as a model, Art & Society anaylizes similar initiatives in the United States. Workshops will introduce the role of mediator within the New Protocol context and consider its significance to the larger curatorial and commissioning field.

VENUES: Institute of Fine Arts - New York University ; CCS Bard

Composing Differences brings together artists, curators, researchers and other arts professionals from France and the United States who establish new art platforms and experiment with art as an agent of social change. It also explores tactics of knowledge production that promote the circulation of knowledge and defend its essential value. This program is curated by Virginie Bobin and conceived by Glass Bead (Fabien Giraud, Jeremy Lecomte, Vincent Normand, Ida Soulard, Inigo Wilkins), PAF, Council (Grégory Castera, Sandra Terdjman) and Open School East.

VENUES: MoMA; MoMA PS1; e-flux

In two roundtables featuring French and American thinkers and artists, followed by a published volume, The New Existentialism is curated by Tim Griffin will evoke recent philosophical proposals and link them with some related artistic practices. More specifically, emerging philosophical tendencies around the notion of objectivity, and of Speculative Realism, will be put in tension with similarly developing philosophical approaches that encourage subtle re-readings of structuralism, a new reception of Guattari's legacy in the field of anthropology, and a political appropriation of the notion of anthropocene.

VENUE: The Kitchen

France Culture will present a week of special shows dedicated to New York’s current cultural events and orchestrated by Arnaud Laporte and several American critics. This in depth look at American cultural events will allow the French audiences to explore how cultural events are discussed in America, and ultimately, it will reveal the differences between French and American cultural critique itself.

VENUE: Cultural Services of the French Embassy

Although they are not directly tied to the program’s research themes, these events each demonstrate the strong connections between cultural production in France, Europe and the rest of the globe. The Satellite Events further explore many of the issues within the main program of ART², a month-long visual arts festival exploring ideas through seven themes paramount to the international art world.

VENUES: New Museum; Andrew Kreps Gallery; Forever & Today, Inc; 303 Gallery; Josée Bienvenu Gallery; Perrotin Gallery

French Embassy Cultural Services