Adrien Sina

Archeology of Desire
Curated by Sarah Wilson
January 28th - February 24th, 2005

The Archeology of Desire relates to the future and to archaic memories conjugated across times and civilisations. Adrien Sina presents an Erotic Museum which analyses our particular Zeitgeist. He combines the world-wide repertoire of his own photographs with the anonymous archive of the web, which offers his 'Archeology' complementary layers of reality. The personal meets the universal, the individual eye meets the anonymous image. Boundaries blur between curatorial, art-historical and artistic practice. A question is explored as though several artists with different viewpoints were collaborating. Like Michel Foucault in the Archeology of Knowledge, Sina proceeds forensically. We are invited to decipher a corpus of work, structured like a discourse, with constant underlying principles. A visual semiotics is at play: provocative and exotic, his captured moments also contain tenderness and delicacy. Yet Sina's archaeological practice retains its exteriority to its subjects; it does not reconstitute original emotions, experiences, communications. The flows of desire are checked by critical distance, by the frames of the image and the grids of display.

Adrien Sina www.adrien-sina.net/t12/
trained as an architect at Paris-Villemin and the Architectural Association in London with Bernard Tschumi. He was introduced to performance by Jochen Gerz. His work on pre-Socratic philosophers has been essential for his art and theoretical practice, and he has published two interviews with philosopher Paul Virilio. He has exhibited extensively, from Kyoto Future City Art Museum, 1994, to 'TransArchitectures 03' NAi-Rotterdam, 1998, and at various institutions in France. Among his curatorial projects are Fugitive Fluctuations for the Espace d'Art Yvonamor Palix in Paris in 1995, Fugitive Fluctuations mutation 2 (Ferme du Buisson Contemporary Art Centre, Noisiel 1996) and the performance-based Tragédies Charnelles, (Château de Pommery, Reims, 2000). He conceived and edited special issues of La Mazarine on Tragédies Charnelles + Fluctuations Fugitives and Immanences Spatiales, the same year. In 2003 he was advisor to Tate Liverpool for Art, Lies and Videotape: Exposing Performance. He has taught extensively in Europe and at the Pasadena Art Center and Sci-Arc in Los Angeles. His experimental programme was most interestingly tested in the volcanic French island territory of the Réunion (Indian Ocean, 2001-2) where issues of interracial relations and collective memory became the subject of student videos, performances and works with new media. He will be presenting pioneer futurist artist Valentine de Saint-Point at RoseLee Goldberg's Performa Biennale, New York, October 2005. Adrien Sina lives and works in Paris.