Etienne Chambaud: Limbo

Mulhouse, France, 1980. Lives and works in Paris.

Chambaud’s multimedia practice is interested in the general issues about the relations between continuities and discontinuities, his work mainly focuses on an “Ecology of Separations”: an on-going investigation on the limits between things, such as their presentation and their perceptions.

«An on-going investigation on the limits between things, their exhibitions and their perceptions..»

Chambaud works with exhibitions, computers, collages, photographies, neons, paintings, films, texts and situations. He has built a geolocalized raft called “Idealism” that was set adrift in the Atlantic Ocean and reconfigured world atlases; he has staged the encounter of geometrical figures and monkeys in a zoo and given human fever to inanimate objects, constrained large scale mobiles with their very exhibition space, reversed animal hides on stretchers or written on walls with inscribed stones. He has directed films like Counter-History of Separation (with Vincent Normand), which follows the common history of the guillotine and the modern art museum from the French Revolution to the late 1970′s, or INCOMPLT, which frames the copresence of thousands of butterflies, ice sculptures and musical algorithmic processes.

Étienne Chambaud graduated from an MFA at Villa Arson in Nice (2005) and obtained a BFA from ECAL School in Lausanne (2003). He was selected to participate in the residency program “Fieldwork: Marfa” in 2014.

Selected Solo Exhibitions: “Inexistence”, Esther Schipper, Berlin, Germany (upcoming) (2021) ; “Noeuds Négatifs”, La Kunsthalle, Mulhouse, France (2018) ; “INCOMPLT”, LABOR, Mexico City, Mexico (2016) ; “The Naked Parrot”, LABOR, Mexico City, Mexico (2013) ; Undercuts, Forde, Genève, Switzerland (2012) ; Contre-Histoire de la Séparation, CIAP, Vassivière, France (2010) ; On Hospitality, LABOR, Mexico City, Mexico (2010) ; Le Stade des Sirènes, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, France (2010). Selected Group Exhibitions: I am Nature_On Vulnerability. Survival in a society at risk, ROHKUNSTBAU, Schloss Lieberose, Germany (2021) ; #TodosSomosHonolulu, LABOR, Mexico City, Mexico (2020) ; La Mêlée, Galerie Artemisia, ENS Lyon, France curated by Florence Meyssonnier (2019) ; Persona Grata, Mac/Val, Vitry-sur-Seine, France (2018) ; The Radical Imaginary: The Social Contract, VOX, Montreal, Canada curated by Marie J. Jean (2018). Chambaud’s work is part of important art collections such as: Centre Pompidou (FR), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (FR), Fondation LVMH (FR), Fondation Lafayette (FR) and Kadist Art Foundation (FR/US)