ORACLES AU-DELÀ DES MERS @ Villa Médicis: Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien

As it does every year when summer is on the horizon, the French Academy in Rome brings together the projects produced by its sixteen fellows in a collective exhibition to mark the end of their year-long residence at Villa Medici. On this occasion, the artworks leave the intimacy of the studios for the exhibition spaces where they meet the public.

The exhibition, containing the fruits of a year’s work and interaction in the fertile context of a residency in Rome, showcases the meeting of multiple aesthetic languages, trajectories, and geographies. It gives material form to projects that break free from classical formats to set up a dialogue among the Fellows’ practices, from visual arts to art history and theory and from architecture to literature, revealing creation in motion.

The exhibition walkthrough encourages visitors to imagine each work as a sybil: like those ancient prophetesses, the Fellows’ creations are mysterious presences that we consult to change the way we look at the world, without thereby seeking fixed answers from them. Visitors are invited to wander through an unpredictable space where the boundaries between disciplines fade away. The works become gateways to narratives and visions that normally escape our perception.

The exhibition title is inspired by the work Oracles from the Sea (1998), by Palestinian visual artist Vera Tamari. The artists invited for the exhibition are Nastasia Alberti, Jacques Kaufmann, and Alice Visentin.