EARTH, FIRE and DREAMS by Andrée Weschler and Javier Canales 2017-2021

Earth, Fire and Dreams is a contemporary artistic meeting in a frame of history and tradition. The project is the result of a collaboration between the French artist Andrée Weschler and the Chilean artist Javier Canales, who have been devoting themselves for four years to creative research and artistic practice in relation to territory, body, earth and history with clay as the unifying element. It is the material with which they pay hommage to ancestors and contemporaries, from the origins of the Austral Aboriginal peoples to the concept of the "Forgotten". Always in search of new aesthetics, they explore the various possibilities of contemporary expression offered by clay. Javier Canales is inspired by an old tribe that lived in Tierra del Fuego in the extreme south of Patagonia. 6000 years ago, the Selk'nam were close to nature, respectful of the earth, and would have had a lot to teach us. Andrée Weschler pays homage to artists and models who have been forgotten in order to immortalise figures that society venerates. Her work is a tribute to those who have worked on the statues that line the roads in the countryside and mark important places for the protection of passersby.

The collaboration of Earth, Fire and Dreams has been exhibited at:

Museo Martin Gusinde in Puerto Williams, Navarino Island, Chile

Ateliers Mommen, Brussels, Belgica

Biennale Arte Dolomiti, Italy

Regional Museo of Magallanes, in Punta Arenas, Chile

Musée de la Poterie de Betschdorf, France 

Casa Azul Cultural Center Gallery in Punta Arenas, Chile

Prayer for Unfaithful Women, 2015

The are many stories about unfaithful women. For instance in my hometown in France, during Middle Age, unfaithful women were put into a cage and submerged into the river. If the woman was still alive after 10 minutes it meant that she was faithful.

The Prayer for Unfaithful Women is an art performance about women who consorted with German soldiers during world war II. They were humiliated and had their head shaved in public on the main square.

This art performance is a visual denunciation of the rage under the guise of an angelic prayer.

It is about French memory.

We carry with us from our history.

Andrée Weschler

Wild Flowers, 2001

by ANDREE WESCHLER (FRANCE) and CHUA KA-INN (SINGAPORE)

It started with collaboration between two artists and the landscape, a dialogue among the three elements. Having come from two very different environments, it was their first visit to the Kangnung landscape. Thus begins the communication between nature and human experience.
The intention of the artwork was to extract a line from the landscape, to make simply a drawing, adding or erasing. They started to rework the original beauty of nature, changing the form of the field of dried autumn flowers, according to the way the nature guides them. The flowers, the most beautiful part of the plant, were stripped bare, revealing only the once hidden thin dried stalks, stems painted red.
As the work progresses, perceptions became varied and interchangeable. New experiences, discoveries and visions became important in the process of creating an artwork out of nature. 
The idea was to create a sexual landscape, an exchange of nature with human nature. Where the beauty of the nature invokes in our senses a feeling of sensual desire, a desire to be one with nature, sexuality, a most basic pure form of human nature, is invoked in the landscape.

Can a first performance be truly relived? [2003-2015]

Can a first performance be truly relived? [2003-2015] 

In 2003, I finally accepted that I was living in Singapore and that my time in Japan was over. I decided then that it was about time to meet artists and to look for a space for an exhibition. Lee Wen invited me to participate to the first FOI. It was the first time I was invited to an art event, I was very happy to be invited but the last thing I wanted to do in my art practice and in my entire life was a live performance! However I thought that if I refused, I may never be invited anymore, so I said yes. For three weeks, I was completely petrified, worried, and tense.EndFragment

My performance was titled after Jean-Pierre Enard’s book 'To make little hoods blush'.

How the performance surprised me! It was an enthralling feeling as if I were a puppet conducted by a mysterious puppeteer.

Since then my relationship with performance has vacillated between love and hate.

For FOI 10, I will try to re-do my first performance art as if it were the first time. Can a first performance be truly relived? [2003-2015]


Eulogy by Andrée Weschler and Sabrina Koh, 2015

By common definition, Eulogy (noun) is a speech or a piece of writing that praises someone or something highly, especially a tribute to someone (who has just died). In this duo exhibition by Andrée Weschler and Sabrina Koh, the installation suggests an independent view from each artist, and alternatively, where both settings meet.

Flaneur presents the two artists will make tribute to the people and objects which they have lost along their domestic journey, and perhaps in their own meeting point, to relive those settings in context of the other’s. Andrée Weschler is interested in giving her eulogy to the lost domesticate(d) objects that carry the journey of home stories, while Sabrina Koh aims to reposition and p(raise) the relationships we build in a domestic setting; given or not.

"In this confessional piece of work, we thought about the 'silent' sent-offs of loved ones and objects, and have found that particularly inspiring and relevant to the roots in this metropolis home." - Andrée Weschler and Sabrina Koh

Anitya // Skandhas, 2015

A Collaboration with The Observatory & Elizabeth Lim & Andrée Weschler

ANITYA // SKANDHAS is the fourth in this ongoing interdisciplinary experiment, exploring the relationship between sound and other forms of performative expression. The Observatory and performance artists Andrée Weschler and Elizabeth Lim explore the Buddhist concept of the Five Skandhas -- form, sensation, perception, impulse, and consciousness. 

Sounds directly linked to physical movement and actions by the artists are filtered and manipulated by members of The Observatory. Connections and ruptures between sight and sound, cause and effect, are dramatically heightened, raising questions about the Skandhas, the true self and what makes us human.

As an art experiment, ANITYA // SKANDHAS feeds ancient concepts through contemporary practice to better understand the human condition.

Latent Spaces, Haw Par Villa Warehouse 

Pictures by The Idealist

Bijoux - Jewellery

Andrée Weschler's work encompasses different mediums mainly performance, video and installation. However she also enjoys working with clay. Though these pieces are worn as jewellery, they should be seen as sculptures as each piece is one of it's kind and signed by the artist.

Weschler exhibits a collection of rings carved in porcelain, sandstone and glass, made during the last ten years. The rings bear the imprint of her multiple travels by their color, their shape and also their material used. According to her, wearing a porcelain ring enters the wearer into the world of performance, the fragility of the ring giving a new dimension to the relationship of the body and space.

 

Fragments, 2008

 This antique furniture belonged to Jeanne Weschler, the aunt of my father. She inherited it from her own parents, dating back to 1900. When Jeanne Weschler passed away in 1993, nobody wanted this dresser: it was too big, too heavy, and too impractical. My father asked around and I said that I wanted it. He helped me to install it in my apartment; I was still living in Europe then.

When I moved to Singapore, the only furniture I shipped over here, was this one. Then when I moved around, changed houses, apartments, countries, I always carried this heavy, big and impractical furniture with me. Each time the purpose of the furniture changed according to the place I was staying in.

Last year, I moved into a HDB flat. During the move, a helper broke the precious mirror into “Fragments”.

Andrée Weschler

La Carte de Tendre (The Map of Love), 2011

La Carte de Tendre was a French map of an imaginary land called Tendre produced in the 17th Century, which depicts the "geography of love" according to the Precieuses  of that era: the River of Inclination flows past the villages of "Billet Doux" (Love Letter), "Petits Soins" (Little Trinkets), and intrepid travelers brave the dangers of "Le Lac d' Indiference" (Lake of Indifference). The villages, roads, and topographic features in this allegorical representation trace the myriad facets of love and its associated perils. 

Lynn Lu and Andrée Weschler revisited the map of love with its successes and pitfalls and propose a new reading of the Carte of Tendre with video installation and performances art.

Ref. Carte de Tendre, 17th Century print, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France

Drawn by Melle de Scudery

Engraved by François Chauveau

  

Amputation, 2006

Amputation is an installation of medical tools hypothesizing failure as the naissance of healing: one needs to be sick before one can heal. The installation’s tools belonged to Andrée’s family doctor who was simultaneously caregiver and spectator to her and her family’s lives. This work is done in his memory

Singapore Art Museum

 

If you Imagine my Dear that ... , 2011

“If you imagine my dear that is going to last forever the season of love, you got it all wrong” are the lyrics of a French poem

Si tu t’imagines, by Raymond Queneau, written in 1950 and interpreted by Juliette Gréco.

The images and the material of the video & pictures are taken from a surgery the artist went through. The surgeon, after the surgery gave the video and said: “ Since you are an artist, I thought that you will be interested in it.” The trauma of the surgery over, it took three years to face the brutal reality of the images and dare to look at them and finally do an art work with it.

French poem translated in English:

“If you imagine, if you imagine, girl girl,  if you imagine, that is going to last forever the season of  the season of season of love,you got it all wrong girl, you got it all wrong

If you think my dear, if you think  that your rosy complexion, your hourglass figure, your cute biceps, your nails, your nymph’s thigh and your light-hearted foot, if you think my dear that is going to last forever, you got it all wrong girl, you got it all wrong

Beautiful days go away, the beautiful festive days, suns and planets, all turn in circles, but you my dear, you walk straight, towards what you cannot see, approaching very sneakily, the swift wrinkle, the heavy fat, the triple chin, the limp muscle, come on pick roses, the roses of life and may their petals be the slack sea of all the happiness. Come on pick, if you do not,  you got it all wrong, girl girl, you got it all wrong”

 

Domesticated in her Animality, 2000

“The video lasts 45 minutes. I look in the video camera as if it is a mirror. The video camera becomes a conduit from the private space to the public place.
I pluck my eyebrows, one hair after the other, one by one. At first the process is constructive, the eyes get bigger, the face prettier. But the process does not stop and suddenly removing hair one by one becomes destructive. 
A simple act of everyday becomes definitive.”

Andrée Weschler, 2002

The Venus in Furs, 2006

Video Performance

“It was a large oil painting, done in the robust full-bodied manner of the Belgian school. Its subject was strange enough. A beautiful woman with a radiant smile upon a face, with abundant hair tied into a classical knot, on which white powder lay like soft hoarfrost, was resting on an ottoman, supported on her left arm. She was nude under her dark furs. Her right hand played with a lash, while her bare foot rested carelessly on a man lying before her like a slave, like a dog”

Venus in Furs, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (page 59, Blast Books, New York)