Mauvaises herbes !

With works by Pepe Atocha, Crystal Bennes, Simon Boudvin, Véronique Ellena, María Elvira Escallón, Lia Giraud, Geoffroy Mathieu, Nelly Monnier and Éric Tabuchi, Jürgen Nefzger, Edith Roux, Bruno Serralongue, SMITH and Kristof Vrancken. 

Curated by Luce Lebart and Nathalie Giraudeau 

 

To quote the botanist and artist Lois Weinberger* “The way that a society treats plants is a mirror image of itself.”

Weinberger’s whole body of work is an invitation to see overgrown gardens in a whole new light. From dandelions and bindweed to thistles, weeds, i.e., unwanted vegetation, whether invasive, poisonous or simply unsightly, are doomed to be pulled up or sprayed with weed killer. And yet do these underestimated and denigrated plants really deserve to be destroyed? 

Mauvaises herbes ! is an exhibition that brings together recent works involving photography. Each one ventures into a living world characterised by these self-propagating plants, the many weeds that keep on popping up and growing wherever they want - in cracks, between buildings and on wasteland - areas abandoned by Man that have become a place of freedom and creativity. 

 

• Public preview
Saturday 11 February at 3 pm 
Free shuttle from Paris at 2.15 pm (Place de la Bastille). Reservation required.

• Meet the artists
Saturday 18 March from 3 pm 
Free shuttle from Paris (Place de la Bastille). Reservation required.

 

· Acknowledgements
The Centre Photographique d’Île-de-France would like to thank all those who lent works, without which the exhibition could not have taken place: Centre National des Arts Plastiques (Paris); Fondation des Treilles (Tourtour); as well as galleries Air de Paris (Romainville), Christophe Gaillard (Paris) and Françoise Paviot (Paris); not forgetting the artists themselves. 

* Bergit Arends, Jessica Ullrich, Lois Weinberger: “Lois Weinberger: Green Man”, an interview in ANTENNAE - The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, N° 18, 2011, London, p. 37.

SMITH, Dami (les maîtresses), 2022, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Christophe Gaillard