Curated by Wim Peeters and Marie Denkens, La Boîte-en-Valise is an online exhibition that takes place in a reconstruction of Marcel Duchamp’s 1941 famous mini retrospective work “Boite-en-Valise.”
The exhibition features the work of 39 artists, including Yuji Agematsu, Cory Arcangel, Matthew Brannon, Judy Fiskin, Josephine Halvorson, Marc Hundley, Ravi Jackson, Thomas Kiesewetter, Terence Koh, Zoe Leonard, Jacqueline Mesmaeker, Alexandra Noel, Hikari Ono, Mira Schor, Erika Verzutti, Lawrence Weiner and many others. The exhibition runs from January 9th to February 20th, 2021.
For more information, visit la-boite-en-valise.com.
"La Boîte-en-Valise, is an online exhibition that takes place in a reconstruction (by a Dutch carpenter), of Marcel Duchamp’s 1941 famous mini-retrospective work “La Boite-en-Valise.” The exhibition features the work of 39 artists and will run from January 9th thru February 20th, 2021.
La Boîte-en-Valise was born out of the question on how to bring art to people in times when we cannot travel, currently due to COVID-19 restrictions. As much a reflection on the condition of confinement, La Boîte-en-Valise is also a reflection on showing and viewing art online and an oddball attempt at finding new ways to connect art and people in meaningful ways.
Marcel Duchamp, originally conceived “La Boîte-en-Valise” as a portable suitcase museum, made for his move to New York’s Greenwich Village in 1942, both a commentary on his scarce artistic output, compared to Picasso and the likes and a tool for the artist as a traveling salesman to promote his work abroad using miniature sample versions.
For La Boîte-en-Valise our aim was to strip bare the world wide web to the inner circumference of a box. We wanted to create a conceptual environment that resonates spatially as well as symbolically with our times. Hopefully Duchamp’s box can add to an understanding of the works on view and vice versa.
Each of the participating artists was invited to contribute a single work to La Boîte-en-Valise, regardless of scale, a task that seemed easy, knowing Duchamp was able to showcase 69 works of his own. The majority of historical reproductions of Duchamp’s “La Boîte-en-Valise,” mimic a dense forensic display though, as if the material on view would benefit from being shown from a single perspective. To present all the material online in the form of an exhibition, we made different photographic views of the box, taking inspiration from the publication “La boîte-en-valise. Une œuvre de Marcel Duchamp” (published by Musées de Strasbourg in 2015), which was the first study to take apart Duchamp’s box as a spatial model and which showed us the way out of a forensic scopic model, into an environment that comes closer to what Duchamp must have had in mind when scaling his work down for travel. When it comes to scale and compression, we believe jpegs are the closest we get today, to what miniature objects and small prints were in 1942. La Boîte-en-Valise 2021 brings together all of these elements in an exhibition that will be layered, dense yet playful, in the spirit of Duchamp, while being available worldwide 24/7.
With the exponential rise of online art fairs and viewing rooms, Duchamp’s box also provides a welcome and hospitable settlement in the infinity of online space, a modular environment, that in its dis-functionality, proves to be surprisingly attractive and versatile.
With La Boîte-en-Valise, we were surprised by the apparent inefficacy of the carry-on suitcase as a symbol for global relations and travel today, but by turning it inside out, it became a kaleidoscopic museum, a memory of our inner voyages during confinement and quarantine."
- press release
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