NADJA — Groupshow by Espace Maurice and SARA’S at Dunkunsthalle, New York

Submission
August 03, 2024

NADJA

Groupshow by Espace Maurice and SARA’S @Dunkunsthalle, New York
June 28 — July 28, 2024

SARA’S is pleased to present NADJA, a collaboration between Espace Maurice and SARA’S at Dunkunsthalle, on view from June 28 to July 28, 2024. NADJA is a group exhibition presenting new works by Joel Dean, Dylan Weaver, Alegría Gobeil, and Casimir Ernest Gasser, curated by Espace Maurice’s founding director Marie Ségolène C Brault. This will be the third project of SARA’S residency at Dunkunsthalle, located at 64 Fulton St. New York, NY.

The works in NADJA, ranging from paintings to video, sculpture and performance, are presented through the lens of Andre Breton’s infamous novel, while honoring the life of Léona Delcourt, their surreal short lived romance and the multiple intersecting mythologies, themes and narratives present within the book.

“I couldn’t tell you how I ended up with a copy of the book but sometime at the end of January, two yellow métro tickets fell right out of its open spine. I was holding the ‘64 edition: the one with the big hand and the memorable pencil portrait of Nadja on the cover. The version Breton diligently revised1, omitting all traces of a physical affair. I was holding it up, a few inches from my nose. On the tickets, a tiny note in black pen read something about vacationing, knitting a sweater and looking for a car. They were old but they were not my mother’s, nor my aunt’s. I traced the tickets back to Paris, sometime around ‘82, when the RATP launched a publicity campaign called Ticket Chic, Ticket Choc, a video with yellow tickets painted on a cow, sticking out of back pockets of jeans, top hats, rings, ties and bras. Get your yellow tickets!

The 10th of October, 1926. Nadja2 tells Breton that before meeting him for dinner she asked the employee in the métro to pick heads or tails. As he punched her ticket he said: tails. He was right. You were wondering if you would see your friend again, he said. You will. That night she predicts Breton will write a novel about her, aware of the fleetingness of their encounters, she hopes that a trace of them withstands time.

The 10th of October 2023. A portrait of an imagined woman, is leaning on the floor of Dylan’s mother’s basement. While photographing his work, I fall in love with the large hand that frames her face. Dylan insists that she is Scottish, I wonder how one would know. Strange how a pair of eyes in a painting can be so agile at keeping things from us. This thing with the book, it has developed into an obsession. Nose deep in its pages, I am like a truffle pig. First it was the spine of the book, the tickets like piano keys, then the fleeting romance, the fall into madness, Mélusine: the mermaid, fish suspended in still water but actually moving forward, only forward, never backwards. The temporality of desire, the hand big like a flame, burning fast and bright, the tiles that frightened Nadja from entering a bar, these yellow tiles…. The ticket man. The glove. The convulsive beauty. Playing prey to analogies, as if struck with lucidity. As if all the parts of the cryptogram exist only for you and whomever you deem most trustworthy. And who’s to say it doesn’t.”

— Marie Segolene C. Brault

NADJA

Sara’s at Dunkunsthalle, New York
June 28 — July 28, 2024

Artists: Joel Dean, Dylan Weaver, Alegría Gobeil, Casimir Ernest Gasser.

Curation: Marie Ségolène C Brault (Espace Maurice).

Photography: Stephen Faught/ All images copyright and courtesy of the artist and the gallery.

Dunkunsthalle ➔

Sara’s ➔

Espace Maurice ➔

Scopaesthesia

Stine Ølgod @Pilot, Vienna, Austria

If it was only three points

Theo Guicheron-Lopez @Galerie Paul Scherzer, Halle (Saale), Germany

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