Art works and Exhibitions

Near a cradle, a woman’s voice can be heard. She sings a lullaby in Russian. In a gentle voice, she hums the clauses of an arms contract between Myanmar and Russia. Putin’s regime and the Burmese military junta kill their political opponents, send them to war, to prison or into exile, indoctrinate their people from birth, distort laws and common sense. Russia sold weapons to Myanmar, which used them to suppress pro-democracy demonstrations; then Putin launched a war in Ukraine and bought back those same weapons. This “song” seems to go on forever—only a newborn could remain deaf to it.

In French, the verb « glacer », when applied to a person, can mean to be seized or paralysed by cold. Figuratively, it can also mean to freeze someone—to petrify them under the effect of an intense feeling of fear or horror.

When we, coming from Russia, visited the former gendarmerie and its cold cellars, we could think of only one thing: torture, which has become the norm in Russia.

When an object is frozen in ice, it is prevented from acting or causing harm. But this suspension is temporary, because the ice melts. Thawing becomes a rediscovery: a way of reviving memories and the memory surrounding these objects.

These two actions are contradictory and, at the same time, inseparable. Perhaps they also speak of a way to rescue these objects from the oblivion of seasons repeating in an endless cycle.

Last Meal Cafe is an exhibition about the political use of poison — poisoning as a method of power.

Poisoning is closely associated with food, so the exhibition takes the form of a cafe: a poisoning cafe. Each artist has a table, and each table is connected to a particular case of political poisoning.

Poisoning appears here on different levels: from the physical elimination of a political opponent to the intellectual and moral poisoning of society through ideology, propaganda, corruption, and other forms of manipulation. The cases represented in the exhibition therefore include not only actual political assassinations, but also metaphorical, poetic, and inherited forms of poisoning. Each case is connected to the artist's country of origin.

The tables are created by artists living with a constant sense of inhabiting a poisoned environment — an environment that seeps through the skin and enters the body.

The murder itself is not the point. Killing by poison is more complicated than killing someone with a crowbar in a dark alley. There is a particular poetics to this form of murder.

The poisoner remains anonymous. He leaves no signature because he believes himself to be the only one.