Deadline for applications is Tuesday 18 February to attend our free art-writing course, in collaboration with Bergen Kunsthall and Office for Contemporary Art Norway. Battery', , exhibition view, Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris. Like most of the materials the artist uses, the airbag was found lying in the streets that surround his studio in Aubervilliers, on the outskirts of Paris.
This object is not β or not yet β considered by Douard to be a work, or even part of one. But, for Douard, it has come to represent an idea that is central to the exhibition, at Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris this autumn, which I find him in the midst of preparing for.
It may not look much like one right now but, within a few weeks, this room in Aubervilliers will become a radio studio, broadcasting to the gallery across town a lone female voice, which will sing monotone lines composed from poems sourced on the internet and cut into semantic fragments. Douard has lived in Aubervilliers for some ten years now. As we walk the short distance from his house to the studio, he points out a small domestic workshop where a man of Chinese descent tailors suits, and a warehouse where a group of ageing communists regularly convene.
Part of the graffiti scene as a teenager, Douard has long taken the local streets as a natural starting point for his work. Everything happens on the internet. The particular warehouse Douard currently works in was found for him a year and a half ago by his gallery, Chantal Crousel. The floor is currently striated by a huge metal frame, which was the reason Douard chose such a large space.
Formerly a support structure for a set of street-market stalls, this frame is soon to become the foundation for a series of bulbous aluminium staffs, each wrapped in exposed electrical wires with a current passing through them.
