Aurélien Froment
Table of Recall, 2008 - 2010, Das Zeichen [La marque, The Mark] / Der Blick [La vue, The View] , 2012 and The Second Gift, 2010
On loan to the exhibition Spielerei at Schunck, Heerlen, the Netherlands
29.28.08.2016—27.11.2016

Curated by: Lene ter Haar and Frederik Schikowski

Spielerei is a large-scale exhibition displaying historical and contemporary interactive works of art. The artists’ collective Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV) from 1960 provides the point departure for the exhibition. GRAV artists aimed to bring art closer to their public, activating and liberating viewers with objects of art which engaged the public to ‘act’ in a playful way. At the same time, the exhibition takes the leap into the present and traces the influence that GRAV has had on modern-day artists who are represented here by a wide diversity of work: from political engagement and painted optical illusions to the use of Virtual Reality. The works on loan originate from the G + W Collection.

Table of Recall is based on the popular children's memory game in which a number of square cards are placed on a specially constructed table and turned over repeatedly in order to find a second identical card. In Aurélien Froment's version we see 96 with which the audience is invited to play, displayed on a specially constructed table. They are all ‘post-it yellow’ on the backside and have different images on the front side. The images come from the artist’s own archives, thus throwing a light on different key concepts of his work such as projection, resemblance and error. Instead of 48 pairs Froment’s game has 96 different cards. The images are selected in pairs, so you can still ‘invent’ a memory game from it. It makes the game more mysterious and open to the imagination and creates an exciting situation of negotiating between the players.

Das Zeichen [La marque, The Mark] / Der Blick [La vue, The View] feature images, a hitchhikers mark on a tree and a view of a landscape, that refer to the area in which Friedrich Fröbel (1782–1852) grew up. Fröbel was a pioneer in the study of issues related to young children’s education. He developed various teaching facilities, among which also the first kindergarten. Fröbel, influenced by humanist philosophy, saw education as a key to understanding reality, to making its structure and inner laws comprehensible.

Aurélien Froment's video work The Second Gift consist of a single 7 minutes long video shot of Friedrich Froebel’s second gift, an educational object, filmed here in a white studio and very slowly rotating on itself. The shot is narrated three times (total duration = 20 min). The narrations were recorded on the occasion of the Froebel conference (Grand Rapids, Michigan, July 2010) with Norman Brosterman, a toy collector who researches Froebel’s objects and wrote the book Inventing Kindergarten (Abrams, NY, 1996), Tiffeni Goesel a kindergarten teacher, and Scott Bultman, a former toy manufacturer who organised the conference. The film looks at ways of tracing an object, from what it is made to how it is made, from what it refers in the history of forms to what it allows to project.

The works by Aurélien Froment originate from the G + W Collection.