Yervant Gianikian et
Angela Ricci Lucchi Rétrospective intégrale / Exposition – Installations

For the last forty years now, the Italian artists Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi have been criss-crossing the globe and embracing the century, from within the confines of their workshop - not dissimilar to an alchemist’s laboratory - in Milan. The images that they regularly send us, in the form of films, videos and installations, are not just new: they are revelations.  

Using archive documents but also amateur film footage from the first half of the XXth century, painstakingly sought out and collected, these images then find themselves being be reframed, shifted, refocussed, colorized or slowed. Freed from the glaring eyes and ideologies of their authors, these now disalienated images of our past mark a return, but are different now, as if we were seeing them for the first time.

The artisans behind this revelatory work have taken full note of the revolution that cinema and its by-products has brought about, and of their new-found impetus as arts of our times. With them, the century has become an experience which we live through, film and watch simultaneously. Its images endure, return. Spanning colonization, fascism, imperialism and war, these artists have created a continuity of a unique kind between past, present and future. Via a dual, mysterious effect of this magic spell, the rediscovered time makes history once again. And its images, returned to their former wild - shocking - state, become poetic ones.

At the invitation of the Centre Pompidou and in association with the Festival d’Automne, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi present us here with a complete retrospective of their fifty films, as well as a new film specially commissioned for the occasion. This will be accompanied by an exhibition dedicated to their installations, the first of its kind in France following the Venice Biennale, the New York MoMA and the Hangar Bicocca in Milan.