Marc Bauer: L'État de la mer

FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, France

This is the artist's third exhibition at the FRAC Auvergne and closes a cycle that began a dozen years ago. In 2009, the exhibition Laque and the book Steel dealt with the question of power. In 2014, Cinerama and the book The Architect continued the reflection on the question of the interpretation of historical events. With The State of the Sea and the book White Violence, the historical perspective is resolutely more frontal because it is more current, turned towards the violence of the migratory tragedy we are witnessing.

 

The starting point for this project was an image that appeared on June 12, 2018 in the daily newspaper Le Parisien. It showed the Aquarius ship rescuing migrants from the waters of the Mediterranean Sea. From this document, Marc Bauer undertook extensive research, scouring art history in search of shipwrecks and maritime dramas, establishing links between then and now to point to contemporary violence by highlighting it through its historical precedents. From Egyptian art to ex-votos, from Greek antiquity to the scandal of the Medusa painted by Géricault, from engravings of slave traders to images of Jewish deportees, from the treatment of migrants sold like slaves in Libya to the statements of the former Italian Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini, it is a question of aiming at the present, our present. As the artist says about the migration crisis, "the media treatment of these dramas focuses mainly on the number of dead, missing or survivors but rarely on the individual fate of these people. The information is treated from a very Euro-centric, white point of view, with all the racial prejudices that such a vision implies. I also think that each of us feels a certain discomfort when faced with these images, because when we see them, we feel that what puts us on the 'good side', that is, the privileged side, is purely the result of chance."