Vincent Meessen. Blues KlairTools Anon. Vincent Meessen. Blues Klair. Montreal, Qc: Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, 2018.
Abstract (English)"Vincent Meessen is interested in History and in the construction of colonial modernity in the Western imaginary. Through a research process that is both systematic and speculative carried out in archives and on the ground, Meessen seeks to endow the document with a contextual agency. By linking it to people, objects and events whose intersection within a wide variety of media gives rise to new sensible experiences, the exhibition becomes a site for testing History in terms of the present. The resulting trajectories effectively skew received discourses, proposing rich transcultural and political rereadings and rewritings. [...] At the heart of the exhibition, is the projected film Ultramarine. Within a structure of layered textiles, blue is the chromatic, historical and discursive filter through which a performance by African-American poet Kain unfolds. The famed precursor of hip-hop in the late 60s delivers his 'spoken word' as the Belgian percussionist Lander Gyselinck improvises to the flow of his utterances. [...] These considerations connect with the figure and unfinished literary project Blues Clair by the late French writer and passionate critic of jazz and film, Patrick Straram who lived in exile in Montreal from 1958, after having participated in the Lettrist project alongside Guy Debord in Paris." -- p. 11.
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