Commissioned to devise a unique project for Mudam’s Jardin des Sculptures, artists Martine Feipel and Jean Bechameil (b. 1975, Luxembourg/b. 1964, Paris) have conceived this exhibition especially for this glass-roofed space, responding to its function as a ‘garden’ for artworks.
Rich in visual references to the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century (including the Bauhaus, Constructivism and Cubism) the work of Feipel and Bechameil addresses the complex relationships that exist between technical progress and industry. Reflecting, on the one hand, a period of considerable growth and change, and on the other, the social revolutions that took place and the accompanying hope and disillusionment, their work draws attention to the discrepancy between social progress and an improvement in living conditions, and the slow dehumanisation and fragmentation of the human body. Today, our societies are composed of individuals who depend on technological ‘prostheses’ meant to assist them in their everyday life.
At Mudam, the artists address this question of allegiance to technology in a new light. The exhibition, entitled Garden of Resistance, consists of three sculptures, including a new work. Together they create an artificial, automatised landscape intended to ‘unite the inert and the animate’. The work questions the capacity of our natural environment to develop strategies of resistance to the pressures brought to bear on it by industry. At the same time, the exhibition proposes a fantastical scenario; a hybridisation between nature and technology as opposed to the familiar nature/culture binary. Conceived as a garden of a different nature, its components are not plant-based but metallic and electronic. Nature is denatured; and becomes monstrous.