After having talked with Aurélien Mole, a photographer whose job it is to give an account of that key moment in the life of a work of art; that of its exhibition; and having entrusted to Remi Parcollet an essay on the exhibition view in the age of social media, we wanted to focus on the artists. How can they create, not from the works of others – which has become commonplace – but from the works of others as seen in an exhibition setting? Mélissa Medan, who was born in 1993 and lives and works in Brussels, is a fan of short films with a home-made aesthetic, of appropriated images and of synthesised voices. For Palm, she asked an artificial intelligence to describe exhibition views from exhibitions held at Jeu de Paume, notably the aptly named The Supermarket of Images. The AI in question had no doubt been trained on photographs of landscapes… but, no problem! It has an answer for everything and ends up developing a discourse that is reminiscent of the composition of discourse on art. So much so that the caustic Postcards of Mélissa Medan are as much a critique of “superficial intelligence” as they are of the contrivance of our own relationship with exhibitions.— Étienne Hatt •
Cartes postales [Postcards], video, color, sound, 7’47” © Mélissa Medan
