Introduction

La Kunsthalle Mulhouse is hosting Noeuds Négatifs, a solo exhibition dedicated to the French artist Etienne Chambaud. For this project, the artist builds a display that knots the ruins of a zoo cage and a series of objects, sculptures, collages, paintings and video. 

Negative Knots is a quasi-fractal exhibition. It is composed of several strata of exhibitions that share the same space or compete for it. Neither a simple sum nor a subtraction of one by the other, they suggest a more complex combination which does not reveal itself a priori. They act as many parallel dimensions, sometimes facing one another, sometimes overlapping or coinciding, creating a common space or conversely mutually excluding one another and coexisting without any shared boundaries.

Etienne Chambaud’s work could be described as an “ecology of separations”: an on-going research on frontiers and borders between forms, objects, gestures and discourses. In his work, various spaces, scientific fields, modes of capture, of conservation and of transmission merge, overlap or intersect.