Joana Vasconcelos

Versailles

The Palace of Versailles currently presents the exhibition Joana Vasconcelos Versailles. The palace of Versailles is the place of art par excellence, where artists have always felt at home, displaying their work in it not as an exhibition space but as a setting totally imbued with art. It is a full, complete and rich place where it seems that nothing can be added. It is the ideal setting for celebrating audacity, experimentation and freedom, where creative talent is appreciated like in no other place. For her show, Joana Vasconcelos has developed her art works around the idea that the world is an opera, and Versailles embodies the operatic and aesthetic ideal that inspires her. She says: „When I stroll through the rooms of the Palace and its Gardens, I feel the energy of a setting that gravitates between reality and dreams, the everyday and magic, the festive and the tragic. I can still hear the echo of the footsteps of Marie-Antoinette, and the music and festive ambiance of the stately rooms. How would the life of Versailles look if this exuberant and grandiose universe was transferred to our period?“

The nature of Joana Vasconcelos’ creative process is based on the appropriation, decontextualisation and subversion of pre-existent objects and everyday realities. Starting out from ingenious operations of displacement, a reminiscence of the ready-made and the grammars of ‚Nouveau Réalisme‘ and pop, the artist offers us a complicit vision, but one which is at the same time critical of contemporary society and the several features which serve the enunciations of collective identity, especially those that concern the status of women, class distinction or national identity.

Château de Versailles

June 19th – September 30th, 2012
Place d’Armes
78000 Versailles
France

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