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« It’s not what you look at, it’s what you see. »
Henry David Thoreau

On April 14, Château de Montsoreau – Museum of Contemporary Art participates in the International Slow Art Day. Imagined by Phil Terry, this day goes against a frenetic way of consuming culture and invites us to look at even one work of art but with attention. During a particular day, visitors are invited to take time to admire the works and share their impressions with other visitors for a moment of conviviality.
Created in 2008, Slow Art Day brings together museums around the world that develop a « well-being » approach, connecting mainly to their feelings, emotions, and their own perceptions of works of art. It now covers 12 countries and more than 170 events in international museums: the National Gallery, the Ashmolean Museum, the 440 Gallery in Brooklyn, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney or the Palazzo Strozzi in Firenze.
The principle of Slow Art Day is to watch three works of art for 5 to 10 minutes and then share your experience with other visitors to the museum. At Château de Montsoreau-Museum of contemporary art, visitors are invited to discover Mirror Piece (Art & Language), Air Conditioning Show (Art & Language) and Malabar (Ettore Sottsass) and then exchange their feelings with each other and with a museum mediator over a coffee in his JEAN 2 dining cellar who also practices slow food.

Guided tours led by a guide and lecturer.
For two days, a guide and lecturer accompanies visitors in their discovery of the monument while giving them keys to reading to simply understand Contemporary Art.

At 10:30 am and 11:30 am: the history of the place in 20 minutes.
At 4pm and 6pm: to go further, a detailed visit of the castle and the Philippe Méaille collection.

Exceptional price
Adult: 7,30€
Child: 3€

Created in 2016 at the initiative of the Journées Nationales du Livre et du Vin and the Château de Montsoreau-Museum of Contemporary art, the François Morellet Prize pays tribute to François Morellet, the most exposed French artist in the world.
Before his death in 2016, François Morellet agreed to sponsor this prize, which rewards each year writings on Art, whether monographic, theoretical or historical. The 2018 prize will be awarded on 17 June in Saumur as part of the National Book and Wine Days.

François Morellet Prize 2017
The François Morellet 2017 Prize was awarded on May 14 to 2017 to Michel Onfray for his writings on Contemporary Art. French philosopher and essayist, Michel Onfray founded the Université populaire de Caen in 2002. His media coverage is strengthened by regular interventions in TV or radio where he expresses himself on political and social debates. Michel Onfray has written more than eighty books. His thinking is mainly influenced by philosophers such as Nietzsche and Epicure, the cynical school, French materialism and Provedhonian anarchism.
In his lecture « Is it necessary to burn contemporary art? « Michel Onfray » offers us a rare opportunity to question the foundations of what constitutes the artistic production of our time, to understand, judge and appreciate it.
With his usual clarity, he delivers the keys to a world too often closed to the general public, absent from our education and abandoned by thinkers. By returning to the history and causes of the construction of a movement, to the meaning of the works in the face of the questions of our society, Michel Onfray arouses curiosity and interest: he finally opens the doors of museums and contemporary art collections to us.  » (Lola Caul-Futy Frémeaux).

François Morellet Prize 2016

The first François Morellet prize was awarded on April 10, 2016 to Catherine Millet for her entire critical work.
Catherine Millet pointed out that she had chosen a photo of François Morellet’s famous neon light for the cover of the first edition of her book Contemporary Art in France. She also drew a parallel between the works of the Art&Language collective exhibited at the Château de Montsoreau and the work of François Morellet: « There is a continuity between this very geometric and rigorous art form practiced (with a lot of humour) by François Morellet and Art&Language composed of a group of very theoretical and very funny artists ».

Trophy of the François Morellet Prize
The trophy for the François Morellet Prize was designed by Pascal Morabito. After his studies in architecture, he opened on May 3, 1968, in the family workshops, the first department of artists’ jewellery entitled « the centre for the study and creation of contemporary jewellery or micro-architecture ». Pascal Morabito works in the luxury sector. Passionate about archaeology, he creates his products as the archaeologist gives light to the dark millennia through his discoveries.

The permanent collection of the Château de Montsoreau-Museum of contemporary art is enriched with 800 works from the Art & Language movement. To celebrate this event, the museum is dedicating a major exhibition to it from 5 April ART & LANGUAGE: REALITY (DARK) FRAGMENTS (LIGHT). Recognized as a pioneer of Conceptual Art, the Art & Language movement is present in the collections of the greatest museums: Centre Georges Pompidou, Tate Modern, MoMA.

« We Must Continue To Work Because If We Stopped It Would Be Like If We Had Never Started”.
Art & Language

Artists out of frame
ART & LANGUAGE: REALITY (DARK) FRAGMENTS (LIGHT), gathers  50 years of the career of these critical, provocative, subversive and punk artists. This Art & Language attitude has often made them appear as unclassifiable and marginal artists, refusing to give in to the ease, fashions and impoverishment of art in order to return to the essential: the work itself.

Through the major questions at the heart of Art & Language’s work: the conversation and its capacity to create work, the description, the porosity of artistic practices, the crisis in the relationship between the artist, the museum and the art gallery and its implications for the very process of creation, the Château de Montsoreau-Museum of contemporary art questions the sometimes simplistic reading that has been made of Conceptual Art. Far from the dematerialization of the work of art, would conceptual art have given birth to contemporary art?

From room to room: PORTRAITS, WOMAN, DESCRIPTION, MUSIC IN CASE, MODERN, TEXT, PAST, VOID, ALIENS, CORPORATION, REALITY, FRAGMENTS, FORBIDDEN, the exhibition presents iconic pieces of the movement such as Mirror Piece or The Air conditioning show, installations (Tell me) have you ever seen me? and unpublished texts like the Pornographics texts.
Invariably, the works cause confusion and force us to think outside the box to establish angular, disjointed relationships with language and the visual.

Alexia Guggémos is an art critic. Trained at the École du Louvre, she is the founder and curator of the first museum on the Internet, the Musée du sourire, created in 1996. Author of artist interviews, numerous texts on art for educational purposes and a guide Les médias sociaux à l’usage des artistes published by Thémistocle, she has been leading a column on 20 Minutes since 2007 and the Huffington Post since 2012. It organizes events around art such as the « Art Students Week » operation on Instagram to promote the emergence of young talents.

L’Histoire de l’Art pour les Nuls
Nullissimes arrives in general culture, with this richly illustrated and incredibly educational chronology of art history.
Painting, sculpture, architecture, primitive arts… Tour the world of art through the centuries.
Here is a pedagogical chronology like no other for adults: each double page is drawn with one or more works of art on one page and compared to the pedagogical explanation on the artistic movement, with a more precise focus on analyses of works every 5 or 6 pages, to go further.
Written by Alexia Guggémos, art critic recognized by her contemporaries and author of numerous conferences to make contemporary art more affordable, this book will seduce you with its rich iconography and clear educational explanations.

How does one become the author of «  L’Histoire de l’Art pour les Nuls « ?

AG. « A solid education at the Ecole du Louvre, countless texts as a critic and a passion for contemporary art that is nourished by encounters. Above all, an intuition from the very first hours of the Internet and social networks: new writings are to be explored. Creator and curator of the first virtual museum – dedicated to Smile – since 1996, Executive Director of the International Film Festival on the Internet in 2000, author of the guide « Social Media for Artists » in 2008, creator of the Observatory of the Social Web in Contemporary Art since 2011, trainer at CIPAC… More than 20 years defending new ideas, opening up gaps, always seeking new talents, disclosing best practices for a better control of its digital identity. Until the masterful « Nullissime » in 2018. My latest hobby: Art Students Week, an operation that invites art school students to publish their work on Instagram. Towards new gateways. »

Practical Informations
Meeting and signing: May 12 at 5pm.
Free entrance
L’histoire de l’art pour les nullissimes, First éditions Paris, 24,95€, 288 p.

At nightfall, the sky lights up with celestial lanterns over the Loire.

Used for several centuries in Southeast Asia, celestial lanterns are made from rice paper attached to a bamboo circle. According to Chinese popular tradition, the Kongming lantern was invented by one of the most brilliant tacticians of the Three Kingdoms Zhuge Liang (181-234 AD), better known by the social name of Kongming. Later, they were used for military signage. In all the territories that make up historic China, they were later used for non-military applications at popular festivals such as the Pingsi Festival in Taiwan.
Music group and refreshment bar from 9pm to midnight in the castle gardens.
The lanterns are on sale for 3€ in the museum’s bookshop.
Schedule: 10:30 pm.
Location: Alexandre Dumas Quay, at the foot of the castle.
The event will be held subject to weather conditions

Friday, May 25, 6pm
About Desbois, Rodin and Claudel: representing old age, modernity in sculpture.

« Daring to represent the female body in its decline from old age takes for Desbois, Rodin and Claudel the form of an expressionist manifesto of realism in sculpture. The three artists go beyond the literal, superficial aspect of this representation by seeking to reach the truth. They reverse the academic definition of the Beau attached to an idealized female body to return to the Man in himself. This research is shared by several sculptors in the 1880s, such as Constantin Meunier, but the triptych of Rodin’s Vieille Heaulmière, Camille Claudel’s La Misère de Desbois and Clotho focus our attention on these three artists and the relationships they maintain.

When these works were exhibited, art critics highlighted the violence of this representation. The philosophical aspect of the relationship between the sculpture and the spectator and the body has justified this revolution in expression. This will introduce the changes of scale, the unfolding of movements, the deformations, the fragment, opening the door to modern art.
These works also play a personal role for each of these artists who will reveal the struggles and dramas of their lives. Thus Desbois will make it a manifesto equal to the conflict of the First World War » ( Sophie Weygand).

Sophie Weygand is Chief Curator, responsible for the departmental conservation of the museums of Maine-et-Loire and since 1995, in charge of the department’s « museums » policy. She was responsible for the project to transfer the Jules-Desbois Museum to Parçay-les-Pins (opened in 2001), which became a municipal association museum, and then from 2001 to 2011, project manager for the renovation of the Joseph-Denais Museum in Beaufort-en-Vallée. The conservation department provides scientific support for the network of the associated directorate of municipal museums (DAMM) and the collections of the Jules-Desbois museums in Parçay-les-Pins, Joseph-Denais in Beaufort-en-Vallée, the Musée de Baugé, and the Musée de la vigne et du vin d’Anjou in Saint-Lambert-du-Lattay.

Friday, June 15, 6pm
The Château de Montsoreau in the 15th century and its place in the architecture of the Loire Valley

In the 1450s, John II of Chambes, close advisor to King Charles VII, had the castle of Montsoreau completely rebuilt on the site he had occupied since the end of the 10th century.
The main building, the high courtyard, the low courtyard with the chapel and outbuildings, the surroundings of the castle form a vast land and architectural complex in the very heart of the village of Montsoreau. The study of the monument and the related archives provides a better understanding of how the castle was built, the function of the various spaces, but also places it in the context of architectural creation in the Loire Valley in the middle of the 15th century.
Emmanuel Litoux is in charge of the Archaeology Department of Heritage Conservation in Maine-et-Loire. His research has led him to specialize in the archaeological monitoring of restoration work on Historic Monuments, including the castles of Montsoreau, Saumur, Angers, Plessis-Macé and the priory of Saint-Rémy-la-Varenne.

Friday, September 7, 6pm
The memory of King René: arts and music from the 15th to the 20th century.
King René has remained in the memory of the Angevins a major figure in local history, supported by works of art. Over the years, a true « national » tribute from Angers has taken shape, as a response to the equally lively one from Provence. All are involved, and the initiatives of individuals are listened to carefully by institutions. It is thus a moment of unity that crystallizes around a statue in Angers. However, memory also takes many other forms over the years, depending on the angles of view chosen by painters, musicians and other artists, whether French or foreign.

Etienne Vaquet is Heritage Curator in the Department of Maine-et-Loire. It participates in the preservation, restoration and enhancement of the Angevin heritage. He has worked on various exhibitions on various subjects, such as « L’Europe des Anjou », « Dies solemnis, le Grand Sacre d’Angers » or « Saint Louis et l’Anjou ». Through numerous articles, he presents the results of his studies on the art and history of Anjou.

Price: 3€

On Monday, May 28, Géraldine Bretault returned to the adventure of the Art & Language movement, which radically revolutionized art history in the late 1960s by inventing conceptual art, after a series of lectures organized by Rotary Club on the evolution from impressionist painting to conceptual art. At the Château de Montsoreau-Museum of contemporary art in the Loire Valley, Géraldine Bretault meets Philippe Méaille, collector and founder of the museum.
The conference will be followed by a guided tour and a cocktail.

Adult: 14€
Child (-14 years old): 8€
Information / bookings: 02 41 67 12 60

Géraldine Bretault
A graduate of the École du Louvre in art history and museology, Géraldine Bretault is a lecturer-guide and translator in the cultural sector, a regular contributor to ICOM, INHA and the design journal Étapes. His lectures focus on interdisciplinarity, opening art history to architecture, dance and literature. She is the author of several audio guides of exhibitions and urban tours.

The skin of Chagrin Balzac
19h30
Castle courtyard
Duration: 1h20

La Peau de Chagrin is a beautiful story, that of a delayed suicide: the story of a life.
It is the first great novel that Honoré signs with his name: Balzac. He puts everything he is then, his personal history, his many failures and his last strengths into it. Because he is not yet the author of the Human Comedy: for the moment, for him, not much has worked.
The myth of Faust does not serve him to find the meaning of life, but to take its measure. How much life do we have? And if we were aware of it, what would we do with it? From this shrinking skin Balzac draws the most romantic novel. On stage, four actors prepare for you a macabre dance, a bonfire, a disturbing banquet where this Peau de Chagrin would reduce without losing anything of its taste.

The New Popular Theatre
Le Nouveau Théâtre Populaire is a collective, which created in 2009, an open-air theatre festival in Fontaine-Guérin (49). The festival is growing, until it alternates between six shows per edition. It takes place every summer in August.
The company has also grown over the years. Today, it has twenty members: Pauline Bolcatto, Valentin Boraud, Julien Campani, Philippe Canalès, Baptiste Chabauty, Léo Cohen-Paperman, Thomas Chrétien, Emilien Diard-Detœuf, Clovis Fouin, Frédéric Jessua, Joseph Fourez, Sophie Guibard, Elsa Grzeszczak, Lazare Herson- Macarel, Lola Lucas, Morgane Nairaud, Antoine Philippot, Julien Romelard, Claire Sermonne and Sacha Todorov.
The troupe operates democratically, all decisions are made collectively, but each show has a director who retains his or her artistic uniqueness. Without wishing to assert dogma, the New Popular Theatre recognizes itself in Jean Vilar’s values: great texts, low prices, decentralization.
The festival has already featured Andersen, Brecht, Büchner, Claudel, Corneille, Feydeau, Fosse, Hugo, Maeterlinck, Molière, Novarina, Perrault, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Singer, Sophocles, Tchekhov, Winsor Mc Cay and two collective creations on the 5th Republic and the 1st World War. In 2018, for the 10th edition, the festival will be dedicated to La Comédie humaine after Balzac.
Subsidized by the Entente-Vallée (Beaufort-en-Anjou, Les Bois d’Anjou, Mazé-Milon, La Ménitré), the Ministère de la Culture-drac Pays-de-la- Loire and the Région Pays-de-la-Loire. With the support of the Théâtre National Populaire, the Quai-CDN d’Angers, and the communes of Beaufort-en-Anjou, Loire-Authion, Baugé-en-Anjou.

Reservations from July 23rd by phone, from 3pm to 6pm: 02 53 20 32 99, Monday to Saturday and Sunday August 19th and 26th and on www.festivalntp.com
Choice of rates: 5€, 10€ or 15€. In an ideal of cultural democratization, we propose a pricing system where everyone can choose the price of their place without having to justify their situation

Museums Night

Olivier Slabiak aka OS69, a violinist by training (1st prize at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels), founded in 1992, with his brother, the gypsy and Yiddish music group « Les Yeux Noirs » with which he travels all over the world and records 8 albums. He was nominated in 1994 for the Victoires de la Musique awards. During this adventure at the heart of his own Jewish roots in Eastern Europe, Olivier developed his taste for electronic sounds and mixed traditional repertoire with the world of pop and electro-acoustics.
On May 19 he will be the guest of the Château de Montsoreau-Museum of contemporary art for an exclusive DJ set from 10pm to midnight. On the violin and turntables, Olivier takes you to the dancefloor for a night of museums that is anything but wise.

Practical
Price: 7,30€
Advance sale on site or by phone. 02 41 67 12 60

« What we cannot talk about, we must keep silent, » wrote Wittgenstein.
How was the transformation into art expressed in 1968 and through which means of expression? Cacophony or silence? Has the mutation precipitated the end of painting in favour of other forms of expression?

Through major figures of Minimal Art, Pop Art and Conceptual Art, 1968. SPARTE RÊVE D’ATHÈNES tries to propose an answer to this question. It takes place over three months on the top floor of the museum and brings together works by leading artists from the late 1960s to the present day: Claes Oldenburg, Maria Marshall, Bernar Venet and many others. Immersed in the unexpected landscape of the Château de Montsoreau-Musée d’art contemporain, works of art that have profoundly changed art history create a journey between memory, reverie and utopia. 1968. SPARTE RÊVE D’ATHÈNES tries to take stock of the painting crisis at the end of the 1960s. Has the resistance/rebellion against the established model given rise to a new contemporary language?

Art & Language / Victor Burgin / Dan Graham / Les Levine / Maria Marshall / Edward Rusha / Tony Smith / Bernar Venet

Is poetry dead? What is the common point between « empty couple », « Olympic laziness », « bleating beast » and La Recherche du temps perdu?  Has the advent of digital technology given rise to a new language?
Each in his own way, Etienne Candel and Nicolas Lelièvre divert, push and shape words. New, confusing and unstable universes are emerging. We thought we had said everything about Proust’s masterpiece. It was until Nicolas Lelièvre took it and proposed a brand new arrangement. We thought that the number of characters set by Twitter limited our exchanges to factual data. This was until Etienne Candel’s « ironies » flooded the canvas.
Professor of modern literature, graduate in comparative literature and French as a foreign language, eMMaNuel vasliN (@emmanuel_vaslin) is a keen observer of new approaches to language.
He will lead the meeting between Nicolas Lelièvre and Étienne Candel.

Meeting – dedication – glass / museum bookshop
Time: 4:30 pm – 6:30 pm
Free entrance

Ironèmes of Etienne Candel. It is a box that stores, on 47 metres of roll, some 900 texts taken from the continuous flow of writing that characterizes their author on digital networks. Étienne Candel produces these minimal alterations of language on a daily basis. Representing several tens of thousands of texts over a period of about six years, ironies proliferate as if in a permanent book of wild writings. Lapsus, wit, surprising diversions, false proverbs, amused manipulations, erroneous expressions, they divert language from its ordinary use and suggest another possible world, other meanings, other ways of seeing, as in dreams.
Derobbed from the flow and now kept in their box-book, the ironems thus published bring together the shape of the medieval roll and the contemporary scrolling of the screens. The editorial work is signed Peuple caché, a discreet collective, an activist for the renewal of formats.

Étienne Candel works in the margins: first as a poet on the free spaces of his Bachot notebooks, he explores the field of ironems and gradually theorizes their contours. He will soon publish a practical rehabilitation of garbage and bulky waste (Discourse on Waste, to be published by Surfaces Utiles, 2019). In his artistic approach, where he engages in dialogue between research and creation, he collaborates with graphic designers, painters and coders. He is currently preparing a catalogue and an impossible bestiary. https://ironemes.peuplecache.com
Twitter: @etienne_cdl

In the order of Nicolas Lelièvre presents the entire first volume of Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, rearranged in alphabetical order. From the story, characters and situations only the raw material remains. Browse through this long list, however, offers a real visual experience through repetitions and typographical variations. Perfectly arbitrary, the ranking also produces new associations of ideas and sensations.

Research « in kit form », to look at rather than read, between literature and statistics. A plastic journey into the Proustian lexical field.

Nicolas Lelièvre, an architect who graduated in 2001, first focused on images. If urban spaces and the material of digital images remain among his favourite playing fields, it is a more global questioning of reality that makes his practice evolve with each project. Each proposal examines a specific fragment drawn from immediate reality and attempts to construct a thought to be experimented with. These visual, spatial or semantic detours call for photography, video, computer science, writing, object construction or in-situ intervention.
www.nicolaslelievre.com

ESAD TALM STUDENT PERFORMANCE FESTIVAL
Wednesday, March 6^th 2019
2pm-5pm
Free entrance

To close three days of workshops and exchanges with the artist Grace Ndiritu, the students of the Ecole Supérieure d’Art et de Design Tours-Angers-Le Mans are offering an afternoon of performances at the Château de Montsoreau-Musée d’art contemporain on Wednesday, March 6^th.
Festival coordinated by Chloé Maillet and Natsuko Uchino

Grace Ndiritu

Grace Ndiritu works on performance, painting, video, photography, research. In 2012, Grace Ndiritu made the radical decision to spend time in the city only when necessary and to live in rural, alternative and often spiritual communities, while expanding her research on nomadic lifestyles and esoteric studies such as shamanism, which she has been studying for over 16 years. His research on community life led to the creation of The Ark: Centre for Interdisciplinary Experimentation.
In 2012, Grace Ndiritu also began to create a new work entitled Healing The Museum, born of the need to reintroduce non-rational methods such as shamanism to reactivate the « sacredness » of art spaces. Grace Ndiritu believes that most modern art institutions do not reflect the daily experiences of the public and that the many socio-economic and political changes that have occurred in the world in recent decades have eroded the relationship between museums and their public. Museums are dying. Grace Ndiritu sees shamanism as a way to reactivate the dying artistic space by transforming it into a space of sharing.
Grace Ndiritu exhibits in many museums: Museum Modern of Art in Warsaw; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Chisenhale Gallery, London; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, Antoni Tàpies Foundation, Barcelona; Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Paris; Glasgow School of Art; Klowden Mann Gallery, Los Angeles; La Ira De Dios, Buenos Aires and the 51st Venice Biennale.
www.gracendiritu.com

Natsuko Uchino
Natsuko Uchino is a Japanese interdisciplinary artist, a graduate of the Cooper Union (NYC) and the CCA Kitakyushu (Japan), represented by the Green Tea galleries (Japan) and Last Resort (Denmark). She develops a transversal practice between art and ecology. Driven by her experience in mixed farming to decompartmentalize artistic disciplines, she began ceramics with the aim of creating containers for her agricultural production with the same land that had nourished the harvest. Since then, an apprenticeship in the craft village of Tamba in Japan has confirmed the artist’s interest in the ceramic medium, which in his work serves as a hinge between agriculture, landscape, environment and conviviality. Natsuko Uchino participated in the residency of the Centre International d’Art et du Paysage – Ile de Vassivière in 2014, then worked in 2015 on art subjects in the natural environment with the Ecole Cantonale d’Art du Valais, and rurality with the Peeping Tom Digest magazine. Natsuko Uchino is a professor of sculpture and ceramics at ESAD Le Mans.

Chloé Maillet
Chloé Maillet is an artist and researcher. She studied history and art history at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She holds a doctorate in historical anthropology from EHESS (Ecole des Hautes études en Sciences Sociales), followed the Pavilion programme (Palais de Tokyo, 2008-2009), the Coopérative de Recherches de l’Ecole Supérieure d’Art de Clermont-Métropole (2014-2015), and post-doctoral studies at the Musée du quai Branly (2015-2016). ALHOMA-CRH Correspondent (EHESS), member of the Images re-vues editorial board since 2005, she is a specialist in gender and kinship issues and has published numerous articles in history, art history and anthropology journals. Her thesis, La parenté hagiographique, XIII-XVe s. was published by Brepols in 2014, she is preparing a book entitled Transgenre au Moyen Âge ? by Arkhê.
In duo with the artist Louise Hervé, she founded the I.I.I.I.I.I. (International Institute for Important Items) in 2001, where they produce performances, genre films and installations. Credac (Ivry-sur-Seine), Kunsthal Aarhus (DK), Passerelle (Brest), Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver, CAN), Synagogue de Delme, FRAC Champagne Ardenne and Kunstverein Braunschweig (DE) organized solo presentations of their work. They have published Attraction étrange, JRP (2013), Spectacles sans objet/Spectacles sans objects, Editions P and Pork Salad Press, 2016, L’Iguane, ed. Thalie Foundation, 2018.
She is a professor of history and theory of arts at ESAD Angers.

And also
Lecture by Grace Ndiritu in conversation with Chloé Maillet and Natsuko Uchino
Monday, March 4, 2019 at 6pm.
ESAD Angers Room TO.
Free admission.
Conference in English.

From May 13 to 19, on the occasion of Museum Week, the Château de Montsoreau-Museum of contemporary art, a partner of the event, is joining forces with Wikipedia to organize an Edit-A-Thon or one-week publishing marathon for women. Edit-a-thon aims to create content on Art & Language works and to fight against the lack of women’s contributions to Wikipedia (less than 10% of Wikipedia publishers are women).

Edit-A-Thon: quézako?
An editathon is a session during which a group of people discover and contribute to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, on a theme based on resources made available. These people can: create an article, translate an article from a foreign Wikipedia, enrich an existing article (restructure, add content), add sources to an article, caption photos, find royalty-free photos to illustrate an article or correct existing articles.
At the Château de Montsoreau-Museum of contemporary art, this collaborative challenge adopts a new format – a non-stop week of contributions – and is aimed in particular at women honoured during Museum Week with the hashtag #WomenInCulture.

Museum Week

Every day a hashtag, every day one or more works of the Art & Language collective will be the subject of contributions during the edict-a-thon.

Monday: #WomenInCultureMW

–Victorine, 1981 (libretto of a police opera whose act was performed at the Whitney Museum Biennale in 2012)

Thuesday : #SecretsMW

–11 Studies for a Secret Painting, 1967

–Secret Painting, 1967

–Index: The Studio at 3 Wesley Place in the Dark III, 1982

–Portrait of V.I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock, 1978

Wednesday : #PlayMW

–The Air-Conditionning Show, 1966-67

–Index 01, 1972

–Microfilm Index, 1972

–Loop, 1967

–Index: Incident in a Museum, 1985-87

–Map of Itself , 1966-67

–Map to not Indicate , 1966-67

–Map of Ocean, 1966-67

Thursday : #RainbowMW

–Mother, Father, Monday: Map of the World, 2000

–Flags for Organizations, 1978

Friday : #ExploreMW

–The Air-Conditionning Show, 1966-67

–Mirror Piece, 1965

Saturday : #PhotoMW

–Painting I Nr1 à Nr22, 1966

–Mirror Piece, 1965

–Portrait of V.I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock, 1978

–Microfilm Index, 1972

Sunday : #FriendsMW

-Red Crayola et Art & Language

– Jackson Pollock Bar

Prerequisites
No particular knowledge of Wikipedia. Participants will first create an account on Wikipedia (by clicking here). A training session will be offered but assistance will be available throughout the event. Participants are requested to bring their own laptops and chargers. Wi-Fi access and catering are provided. You will have books from the documentary collection of the Château de Montsoreau-Museum of contemporary art. See the event’s project page on Wikipedia.

FAQS
Founding principles
Wikipedia in brief: the essential thing to know
Interface: the operating instructions
Start on Wikipedia
Newcomer Support Forum

From May 10^th to July 5^th 2019, the exhibition Mappa Mundi presents the new acquisitions of the Château de Montsoreau-Museum of contemporary art: 50 unpublished works by Art & Language, shown for the first time in France.
Displayed on the top floor of the museum, the exhibition opens with the installation Mother, Father, Monday: Map of the World, 2000, a monumental work composed of more than 150 monochrome paintings representing a huge map of the world. Each painting is autonomous but also represents a detail of a map of which it is a part. As in Lewis Caroll’s The Snark Hunt, the map stretches and eventually occupies the entire surface of the room.

The film Qui Pourra is a dive into the studio of the artists of Art & Language. The title refers to an injunction by Gustave Courbet – « Find out who can » – about his work L’Atelier du Peintre. The artists are absent but their voices, far away, are heard as the voice-over of a film. They are joined by another voice, unidentified, which makes a hesitant entry in the form of a text that gradually invades the image.

Produced in 2019, Ten posters: illustrations for Art-Language is a series of ten posters produced in 1977. Art & Language raises the question of how the work is made. By diverting the codes from the propaganda posters and building this series of posters as a series of images, in the manner of the 7 deadly sins, these posters tell us about the foundations of our society and especially about what makes the success of the codes of tragedy within it.

The exhibition ends with a room banned to children under 18 years of age in which a series of variations on pornographic texts are presented, gradually evolving towards comedy, in the manner of Ms Malaprope.

Starting from the 6^{th of} July 2019, the Château de Montsoreau-Musée d’art contemporain will give carte blanche to the Swiss artist Roman Signer, known throughout the world for his explosive performances and his risk-taking. The exhibition puts sculpture and photography in perspective and highlights the artist’s ability to rethink the very principles of contemporary sculpture.

An artist under tension

It is a commonplace to say that revolution is something stupid, risky and dangerous. The exhibition occupies four months on the second floor of the Château de Montsoreau-Museum of contemporary art and brings together Roman Signer’s flagship works such as a series of unpublished photographs taken between 1972 and 1986. Legendary for his interventions on objects that he transforms with explosives as a driving force, Roman Signer also uses the snapshot to freeze his concerns. In the course of the photographs on display, nature reveals itself as the artist’s studio or rather laboratory. The visitor is invited to enter and observe from a distance. He becomes a spectator of the happy or catastrophic « accidents » skilfully orchestrated by the artist (Ballon mit Spazierstock, 2016) at a time when reality is disrupted, modified by an unexpected event. The exhibition shows the work of this artist, often wrongly perceived as in search of spectacular and sensational. The works chosen show Signer as a precise and direct operator, refusing to stage himself and rejecting the concept of performance.

Time Sculptor

We find there the artist’s constant concern to question time. Long time, when a helicopter disrupts the improbable concert of a pianist on a lake pontoon (Vers la Flamme und Roman Signer, 2014), short time when a series of water-filled cans tumble at full speed from the roof of a house (Dachlawine, 2017). The scenographic journey thus underlines the crucial role of the four elements in the artist’s work, the starting and ending point of his works.
Roman Signer reserves surprising destinies for the most harmless objects such as a fan or a balloon, thus creating a poetry of destruction.

07/06/2019 – 11/06/2019
Every day from 10am to 7pm
Public opening on July 6 at 6pm

On Sunday, July 21rst 2019, the Château of Montsoreau-Museum of contemporary art welcomes My-Lan Hoang-Thuy and Julien Carreyn for the launch of three publications from the « Veronica » exhibition presented by the Frac Poitou-Charente starting from February 8^th  till May 18^th 2019. In these publications, My-Lan Hoang-Thuy moves away from the traditional format of the exhibition catalogue, to give her interpretation of the corpus of images created and produced by Aurélien Mole and Julien Carreyn during the « semi-fictional » editing of their Angoumoisine exhibition.

Museum Bookstore – Free admission

Time: 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm

Veronica
The FRAC of New Aquitaine invited Aurélien Mole, an artist and photographer specializing in the documentation of contemporary art, to design a series of exhibitions based on their photographic collections. Aurélien Mole has joined forces with the artist Julien Carreyn whose work, sensitive to the temporality of aesthetics, explores the poetic and symbolic potential of the academic artistic genre that is the nude. The exhibition they designed together revealed the particular attention paid by the three New Aquitaine FRACs to a photograph of « photographers », particularly during the first decade of their collections’ development, when this medium had not yet been widely used by visual artists. The fifty or so works selected were deliberately selected subjectively by the curators-artists according to an « aesthetic cut »; guided by the following question: « Which photographs would we like to see brought by a nude model in the exhibition room? ». The exhibition also featured photographic works created by Aurélien Mole and Julien Carreyn during the montage.

Julien Carreyn
Julien Carreyn was born in Angers in 1973. He lives and works in Paris. After working as an artistic director, Julien Carreyn refocused his activity on the production of images, drawings and photographs. Since then, he has worked with great perseverance, almost obsessively, to produce an increasingly dense and varied selection which explores transversal image culture, including erotic comics from the 1970s, impressionist painting, youth illustration, etc. More recently, in « Photographies du soir » at the Crèvecoeur Gallery (Paris), Julien Carreyn’s outdoor photographs explore our country and its difficulties in negotiating its prestige (essentially linked to the past), and in obeying the criteria and tastes that are supposed to be those of the middle classes. It is neither a critical approach nor a testimony but rather a flight; a desire for distance whose starting point would be a peri-urban area on the edge of nothing. Between 2016 and 2017, Julien Carreyn presents « Chez Bergeron » at Le Vent des forêts (Fresnes-au-Mont) as well as a collaboration « Julien Carreyn with Ker-Xavier » at the Galerie des Multiples (Paris).

Aurélien Mole

Aurélien Mole was born in 1975 in Tehran. He is a graduate of the Louvre School in History of photography. He continued his studies at the Ecole nationale supérieure de la photographie in Arles and concluded his studies with a training course on the practices of the exhibition directed by Catherine Perret and Christian Bernard. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Galerie Lucile Corty in 2009 (En bonne intelligence), Galerie Florence Loewy in 2010 (Le Catalogue), at the Villa du Parc in 2012 (Sir Thomas Trope). He has participated in numerous group exhibitions in France and Europe in general (Cargo Culte à la Vitrine; Répétition dans l’épilogue, galerie Lucile Corty; If I can’t Dance I don’t want to be part of your revolution, Van Abbe Museum; Double Bind, Villa Arson). In addition, he has regularly published reviews of his exhibitions in the magazine Art21, as well as monographs on contemporary artists (Aurélien Froment, Guillaume Leblon, Gaël Pollin…). He also organizes exhibitions based on devices within the collective le Bureau/(35h. at the Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers in 2004 ; P2P at the Casino, Luxembourg, in 2008) and in his own name (Relationship of Command, Galerie J in Geneva in 2007 ; Sfumato in Sassari in Sardinia in 2008).

My-Lan Hoang-Thuy
My-Lan Hoang-Thuy was born in 1990 in Bourg-la-Reine. She lives and works in Paris and attended a training course at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris from 2015 to 2017.

« Two-headed. Perhaps it is a two-headed work that the visual artist My-Lan Hoang-Thuy is directing. His creations are intertwined with two visual cultures, one western and the other far eastern. Western culture is, for its part, linked to its Franco-Swiss studies of graphic design where the history of its codes and its effect on the conditioning of minds permeate it. The result is creations that question the power and impact of visual language on society. This is the case with her series of wooden signature sculptures by the great names of the Sillicon Valley (Sergey Brin or Mark Zuckerberg). By drawing in space these names of personalities who are at the origin of the tools we use every day, the artist illustrates a normalization in action. Defining the tool is influencing the shape. It also goes back to the source of a typology of symbolic tools (Mac, Photoshop, search tool such as Google) to reverse a certain predictable visual order. The other part of her work, whose source is more buried but notable, comes from this Asian culture, sometimes kitsch, in her words, which emerges in the form of materials (mother-of-pearl, wood) or certain floral motifs, such as its tattooed flowers or sculptures that use the structure of Vietnamese temples. Her self-portraits on mother-of-pearl, small fragments of her own image, revive two stories: her own, of course, but also that of the photography diverted from its traditional medium. This is also the case with the photographs she has taken of her personal environments, printed on PVC, which allow the image to go beyond the frame. Emancipating techniques, reversing them: this is how the approach of an artist who knows the technique and machines too well is structured so that she does not abuse them, in order to conjure up the predictable and disrupt the expected ». (By Léa Chauvel-Lévy)

The Château de Montsoreau-Museum of contemporary art opens its exhibition spaces to the practice of yoga and invites you to be part of the place.

On Saturday 10 and Sunday 11 August at 9 am, Garlone Bardel and Dominika Roslon, founders of Slo.TIME, will be setting up their yoga classes in the museum’s rooms.

The practice consists of two stages: Hatha Yoga, postural yoga, accessible to all, which unties body tensions, and Yoga Nidra, which results in a triple relaxation: mental, physical and emotional.
In Yoga Nidra, only listening is solicited, creating a particularly refined sensitivity to words, a real sensory springboard towards the experience of works of art.
At the end of the Yoga workshop, a breakfast from the Yoga Cook Book written by Garlone Bardel will be shared at the Jean 2 restaurant.
A global experience, related body and mind, where art weaves close links with the art of living, where contact with interiority allows us to open our eyes to the outside with an expanded consciousness.

Slo.TIME was born from the common desire of Garlone Bardel and Dominika Roslon to put their fields of expertise at the service of the human being in order to achieve greater discernment and harmony
in everyday life, weaving links between individual and global ecology.
According to the adage « Less is more », they offer yoga experiences, foods to share and spaces to live in, in adequacy with our fundamental needs of respect for the Earth, the body and the mind.
INSTAGRAM : @slo.time

Duration: 1h30
Price: 25€ / person
Number of places limited to 20 people.
Provide a comfortable outfit.
Equipment provided: carpets/cushions / blankets.
Reservations: 02 41 67 67 12 60 / contact@chateau-montsoreau.com