Benoît Billotte | 2016 Residency
Mainland China | Visual Arts
April 5 – July 1, 2016 — Visual Arts
Nationality: Switzerland
Residency location: Shanghai
Partner organization: Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai (MoCA), Shanghai
Benoît Billotte was born in Geneva, Switzerland. A world travelling land-surveyor, the artist skilfully gathers readily available information, materials and texts from diverse media and translates them into maps, statistics, and architectural layouts, among other visible forms. Translated into statistics, maps, plans, architectures, he reveals the various forms of soft propaganda in which we evolve. His creations have already been shown during solo exhibition in various institutions: Centre Pompidou-Metz, France; Contemporary Art Space, Geneva, Switzerland; MUDAC, Lausanne, Switzerland.
He presented “Is Here Somewhere Else? A Sense of Déjà Vu” at MoCA Pavilion, creating a set of works about this sense of déjà vu related to the architecture field and the different construction shapes that he has encountered during his walks in Shanghai. Weaving typical Chinese elements into the works, the artist presents a dreamlike pictorial urban scene that bears both Western and Chinese fingerprints. Each work offers a kind of urban landscape where each and every one can have his own reading, his own drift or maybe just have another point of view about what seems to be common.
