Collection10m2 at Duplex

Started in 2004 in Paris, the collection of the Galerija10m2 consists today of a bit more than 300 pieces representing the work of about 200 artists, young and established ones coming from Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Balkans and elsewhere.
A large part of this collection is currently stocked in Paris. Some extracts of the collection have been presented at the Pitch Gallery in Paris in 2005, in Grenoble OUI art centre in 2009, and on many occasions set in the Galerija10m2.
The exhibition inside the art centre Duplex in June 2011, « Artists from the 10m2 collection », essentially presents the works obtained within these two last years spent in Sarajevo. There can be found works testifying an affiliation or particular attachment to Bosnian capital, contemporary local scene, and a strong link with a history of two facilities: Galerija10m2 and Duplex.

Represented artists are:
Ambrosia, Alexis Argyroglo, Ervin Berbić, Christiana Biron, Sandrine Biroux
& Mathieu Bonjour, Elvire Bonduelle, Igor Bošnjak, Leila Čmajčanin, Clôde
Coulpier, Grégory Cuquel, Baptiste Debombourg, Andrej Đerković, Elvis Dolić,
Dženat Dreković, Jusuf Hadžifejzović, Ibro Hasanović, Adnan Jasika, Adela Jušić,
Jan Korbes & Denis Oudendijk, Kosta Kulundzić, Fred Landois, Camille Laurelli,
Miodrag Manojlović, Marianne Marić, Nenad Malešević, Mladen Miljanović,
Adi Muslić, Damir Nikšić, Navid Nuur, Roman Ondàk, Renata Papišta, Damir
Radović, Lina Scheynius, Dario Smetisko, Triin Tamm, TRIO (Bojan i Dada
Hadžihalilović), Unknown Author, Edin Vejselović, Nardina Zubanović

Result of encounters, collaborations, exchanges, recoveries, amount of objects proceeding from the collector’s accumulation, artistic gesture and exhibiting works in the gallery, the collection 10m2 manifests to each appearance the ambivalent preconception which was its foundation. There is some truth and false, some substance and pretense in this collection where autonomous, integral and signed works, limited editions, work fragments which are like so many other documents, souvenirs of visited exhibitions, objects devoted to the cult of art and to its possession, whatever the species, and all the way minute reminders, amusing winks, ironic references or simple curiosities» repeating Damien Grimbert’s terms, fragments and tools from past performances, bait objects in disorder, which seem to ironically send us to vanity of the entire act of the collection, to a foolish desire to sign this passionate and meticulous act in history to a foolish desire to sign up this passionate and meticulous act within a larger history, in a “supra humane” temporality which would be that of the art history itself. These relics activate the memory of faded, stable or precarious forms, and in any case temporary and past. They tell stories, wake up curiosity, construct other present of works, and other relations to the spectator. The clash and the mise-en-scène of this collection are a work on their own… perhaps! The ambivalence remains set in this puzzle or that « harlequin clothes », as we say of a work composed of pieces taken from other authors, or a poor man’s mealcomposed of food left-overs.  A game on the status of each displayed object and on the collection’s status itself. A game of crossed manipulations which humorously reflects the great art performance and its marketing. Every collection has its own market value and operates with a certain partition, user’s value and exchange value, that is to say a system based on a monetary value. The collection 10m2, established without any money and without any vocation of making it, doesn’t have any market value and forms a sort of private, affective and sentimental utopia. In 2013 the entire collection be photographed, identified and documented as the establishment of the well-thought catalogue. Several projects are either being studied or prepared in order to document the integrality of the collection between 2012 and 2014 in France and in Europe…

Pierre Courtin, June 2012

Elegy to the detail or a scrappy look

It’s an empiric story of contemporary art gleaned the day after the taking off of the exhibition on the sidewalks of galleries horrifyingly emptied of their consistencies. Faddish, dying consistencies re-emerging by the end of the month. The idea of throwing the installation objects is without a doubt convenient to the time that is ours, easily replacing everything that belongs to the field, greatly overstating the « useful » part of it. But are art objects, being art itself, always the children of « useful » ? Pierre Courtin collects vestiges, divers compound materials made of art. The result of this is a collection of countless fragments stored here and there. From basement to basement. All it took was freeing them out of their dusty carton boxes, for a clinical “ mise-en-scène” to allow us to analyse history or histories from them. They would without a doubt operate as souvenirs encouraging the feeling of shared archaeology: everyone participating in a common memory will recognize in an anecdotal way their experience with the entire work, their encounter with the artist etc… This way, we would offer it a recompensation from a scrappy, bursting point of view. And finally, the reminiscence of the detail would make us wonder: What is really a work of art? …

Anaïs Delmas, February 2012