Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton
11 February, 2011 – 8 May, 2011
101 Avenue des Champs-Élysées, 75008 Paris
T. +33 1 53 57 52 03

For its 14th exhibition, the Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton is offering a new variation on the theme of travel and choosing to reveal the “Somewhere Else” of eighteen so-called “expeditionist” artists. A growing number of artists are choosing this framework: relocating creation in order to define it differently, setting out, installing the work of art or producing it outside of its conventional environment. The nature of the expedition to which these artists devote themselves may vary widely. In this movement, in this encounter with new spaces and other humans — sometimes distant, sometimes near, but always “other” — the artist finds the opportunity for a singular creation that is primarily characterised by its offset nature.

Somewhere Else opens symbolically with the tragic example of Bas Jan Ader, who set sail in 1975 to cross the Atlantic on an unsuitable boat, at the cost of his life, and with the iconic example of Giovanni Anselmo, who climbed Stromboli in an expression of contact with the infinite. This foundational experience emphasises the poetic necessity of leaving: it seems that authentic art can only exist and blossom “somewhere else”.

The geographical elsewhere is explored by a number of the artists in the exhibition: Joanna Malinowska travels the farthest, in the hostile Arctic regions. Laurent Tixador and Abraham Poincheval try out an underground elsewhere during an unprecedented mobile troglodytic adventure. For Olivier Leroi and Alix Delmas, the somewhere else is not only geographical but also contextual. Some people expect information about the state of the world from the expedition, while others view it as a test, and others still an adventure. To the point of reaching, like Andreas Angelidakis, the ultimate form of creation: setting off to explore virtual worlds generated by the digital civilisation.