Carolina Grau /Curator 

FREE ELECTRONS: Selected videos from the Lemaitre collection

Johanna Billing, Yang Fudong, Fabien Giraud, Steve McQueen, Aernout Mik, Laurent Montaron, Pablo Pijnappel, Christoph Rutimann, Bojan Sarcevic, Catherine Sullivan, Ulla von Brandenburg and Clemens von Wedemeyer

Free Electrons tend to drift randomly from one atom to its neighbouring atoms. They move randomly and in all directions, but if some outside force acts upon the material, this flow is called electrical current.

During 1960’s there was a cross-fertilization between theatre, dance, film, video and visual arts. Video was often a means of documenting artists’ actions in performance and in their studios. Forty years on video and film are accepted as artistic media, and yet their use often returns us to those same subjects and objectivities that artists focused on in the 1960’s. The films and videos in the exhibition will range from works performed especially for the camera - by professional actors, dancers and friends -  to records of rehearsed situations, fictional stories and unusual and unique everyday events trapped by the artist’s camera.

All the works in the exhibition come from the collection of Isabelle and Jean-Conrad Lemaître, who began collecting contemporary art in the 1980’s while living in Spain. For the last 10 years the collection has focused on video and film by contemporary artists, buying across the spectrum from both well-known and emerging artists. The collection reflects their passion as well as the development and variety of contemporary art today.