Curated by Cédric Fauq, Chila will be exhibiting her works in a group show of over 40 artists, entitled Barbe à Papa (candy floss, literally Daddy's beard).
Exhibition overview
Every year in March and October, you can hear from the windows of the Capc Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux the echoes of the funfair that has been taking place on Place des Quinconces since 1854. This echo, amplified, gives rise to the exhibition Barbe à Papa. It takes up residence in the central spaces of the Capc – nave and mezzanines – in the form of a funfair in slow motion and deconstruction, thanks to the help of artists whose works maintain material, formal or cultural connivance with elements of the funfair.
Barbe à Papa is also the attempt to think of the exhibition as staging an "atmosphere". An atmosphere that would have the potential to provoke a wide range of emotions (melancholy, surprise, joy, fear) to finally make us understand the cultural and material history of the funfair. The exhibition thus operates itself like cotton candy: behind its light appearance, it is intended to stick you, if not to the fingers, at least to the eyes. Indeed, cotton candy postulates that the temporary exhibition and the funfair have many points in common. The aim is to observe how artists make use of attention-capturing mechanisms, illusion, "impure" display devices and systems of partitioning space, all characteristics attributed to the funfair, and which raise the question of whether any work of art is also an attraction. One of the crucial observations that guided the project is that while everything floats at the funfair – balloons, bodies, cotton candy and machines – very quickly, everything ends up falling back and getting heavier. Along the way and in the discussion with the artists, we asked ourselves the question: what form of relationship does the funfair allow us to establish with the skies today? A question with a quasi-spiritual content that one would not naturally attribute to the funfair, considered (and sometimes poorly considered) as a popular ritual that does not elevate us – at least the spirit.Cotton Candy seeks to make this gravitational paradox palpable and transform the museum into a space of suspension – of belief, trust and attraction. The works are thus composed of air, electricity, steel and plastic but also sugar, oil and salt. It includes sculptures and installations as well as video, paintings, sound works and performances.The works of Barbe à Papa echo each other through red threads sometimes borrowing their name from attractions of the Foire aux Plaisirs: Sugar Rush; Gravity; Lanterns; Techno Power. These guidelines serve both as problematic nodes and conceptual gathering points to better understand the exhibition, which brings together more than 40 artists, a significant number of whom produce works specifically for the exhibition.