Tetsumi Kudo

ART & SCIENCE SEASON
After a season devoted to contemporary figurative painting in France, then to the links between art and literature, MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain is this year offering three exhibitions at its two art centres exploring the relationship between art and science. This theme resonates with the history of the city of Montpellier, which has played a major role in teaching, the dissemination of knowledge and scientific research.
At the MO.CO., Éprouver l'inconnu brings together more than a hundred works by some thirty artists, offering an open-ended, porous journey through materials, experiments, disciplines and eras, to put reality - or what we know of it - to the test.
In Chaos Theory (1987), James Gleick reminds us that the development of a scientific theory is often based on the repetition of experiments and the recurrence of an event. An isolated event is therefore considered an error. However, in the research process, serendipity, chance discovery, accident and the acceptance of this hazard open up new paths that were beyond our predictions. In this way, we move from known worlds into the unknown.
Some of the artists in the exhibition Experiencing the Unknown come from scientific backgrounds, while others have worked with scientists or are simply passionate about one of these fields. They all share a common interest in experimenting with the unknown through the diversion of forms and processes.
Mary Maggic's biohacking approach pirates biology with a sense of humour, proposing Do It Yourself methods of extracting oestrogen from our urine as a way of emancipating ourselves from institutions. Candice Lin questions the hegemony of Western scientism, contextualising knowledge and materials within the history of domination, through the process of fermenting tea into kombucha. Works produced specifically for the exhibition build bridges between disciplines. For example, a new installation by Roy Köhnke offers a sensual approach to evolution and trans-species relations. Morgan Courtois has designed a series of sculptures smeared with olfactory liquids, like so many portraits and sensory memories of his loved ones, hijacking the processes of the pharmaceutical and perfume industries. Joey Holder takes a speculative approach to zoology, imagining an immersive multi-screen installation with artificial intelligence, playing with our desires for control and our fears.
For this exhibition, the MO.CO. wanted to welcome different generations of artists, from the figure of Bernard Palissy (16th century) to the young international scene (born in the 1990s), including some emblematic figures of contemporary art such as Nam June Paik, Tetsumi Kudo, Kiki Smith and Alina Szapocznikow. Some artists less identified with contemporary art have also joined the exhibition, including Anna Zemánková, Luboš Plný, HR Giger, Victorien Sardou and Emma Kunz.
Finally, the collections of the University of Montpellier underline the power of the cross-fertilisation of knowledge and forms, as well as the importance of the markers of history (discoveries, concepts, objects), which are themselves sometimes doomed to a form of obsolescence.

Du 25 février au 18 juin 2025