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| Julien Prévieux |
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For L.F.D.A. 02.Julien Prévieux’s work for La Force de l’Art 02 reflects his fascination with the accumulation, organisation and classification of knowledge. The piece takes the form of a library stocked with numerous works whose content and message have become historically outdated and obsolete. Collected at length from public and private libraries alike, this new “data base” contains manuals such as the 1959 edition of Le nouveau petit Larousse illustré, or Barrie Soskinsky and Christopher J. Benz’s invaluable Windows 95 for Dummies [“pour les Nuls”] (Sybex, 1999), together with historical and theoretical works such as U.R.S.S., Le pays où le soleil ne se couche pas by Swiss photographer Emil Schulthess (English title “USSR : the country where the sun never sets”, published by Albin Michel in 1971), or La guerre secrète moderne by Colonel William V. Kennedy (English title “The Intelligence War”, published in French by Bordas, 1984), none of whose ideas or central theses have withstood the inexorable passage of time. Forgotten, scorned, marginalised by new knowledge and discoveries, the books find continued meaning in the context of this reorganised library of linguistic, technical and historical rejects. A curious diagram unfolds across the walls, devised in accordance with the technique of data mining – a tool that allows us to analyse data, transforming the books and their subjects into a collection of deranged oracles. Map-like, and with more than a touch of humour, the diagram defines the contours of a parallel, utterly achronic future. Through this work, Julien Prévieux seeks to open up heterotopias, “other spaces” (according to Michel Foucault’s concept) that suddenly make utopia tangible, taking the viewer on a vertiginous journey to the heart of the history of knowledge and ideas. Julien PrévieuxSince his graduation from the Ecole Supérieur d’Art in Grenoble in 1998, Julien Prévieux enjoys mischievously infiltrating various domains to demonstrate their treacherous and absurd nature. Whether it is a master of the art preceding him, the corporate world, or that of economics or politics, his approach consists of imitating or reproducing their manner of functioning for satirical purposes. By mocking them through this play of shifting citations, Julien Prévieux builds works which, while looking like farces, nevertheless reveal troubling truths. [M. A.] Julien Prévieux was born in 1974 in Grenoble.
 Julien Prévieux
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