Archeologia takes place at 40mcube, Frac Bretagne, Musée des beaux-arts de Rennes and Musée de géologie de l’Université de Rennes 1.

Archeologia gathers 23 artists in 4 exhibition spaces that collect and produce contemporary art, or places of archaeology and geology in Rennes. This association brings out and instigates links between an ancient, fragmented heritage, and modern creation. The artists, through existing and new productions, take the liberty to add objects, to fill a gap, to interpret sources and to create vestiges brought to this scientific subject, offering many unverifiable hypotheses.

Archeologia refers to museums’ projects which aim at making attractive vernacular, natural or scientific aspects of an epoch or a land. Here archaeology, a discipline based on the study of objects from any time-period and location, is the link between the works exhibited.

The Museum of Geology, in which is exhibited the series of 25 paintings – above the display cabinets – ordered by the Institute of Geology in 1941 from the painters Mathurin Méheut and Yvonne Jean-Haffen, is associated to Archeologia as another stop in this journey through time.

At the Frac Bretagne, the exhibition has been thought of as the archaeological report of a particular contemporary production and gathers pieces that have the appearance of ancient objects, of collections, of studies of a place or of an event. The artists, Wilfrid Almendra, Bruno Botella, Carol Bove, Étienne Chambaud, Pascal Convert, Piero Gilardi, João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva, Laurent Le Deunff, Beat Lippert, Armand Morin, Lucy Skaer and Virginie Yassef, all make a reference to this scientific discipline, and even suggest an archaeology of art, giving an artistic status to objects or actions often viewed as part of the daily life or as some sort of ritual. They use ancient techniques, reproduce shapes and gestures of the past with modern materials, create new mysterious shapes and develop questions linked to the field of archaeology through the adoption of the methods and mechanisms belonging to archaeology such as excavations, collections, archives, display cabinets…

Ann Guillaume extends this process by showing in the Museum of Fine-Arts of Rennes a film shot for this exhibition among the archaeological collections of the museum, inspired by a motif present in one of the collection’s painting.

At 40mcube, the exhibition offers a temporal fault linked to the architecture and the utilisation of the place. Christophe Sarlin ’s piece, created for the event, separates the exhibition space with a partition wall splited by a fault that mimics the economic graphs. Daphné Navarre looks at the immediate history of the exhibitions at 40mcube. Similarly than the codes used for a dig, she resuscitates a selection of artworks exhibited in that place. She thus creates new landmarks, in the way of Benoît Maire in a video that shows unidentified measuring objects, emphasising the enigmatic and aesthetic aspect of archaeology. Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet take us to the future with the invention of an archaeological tale based on a real and documented fact.

Presented on a building of the University of Rennes 1, Lara Almarcegui ’s work extends this relationship to a building and its story at the scale of a constructed territory. She makes the inventory of the building materials necessary for the construction of the university campus of Beaulieu.

Each in their own way, the artworks gathered in Archeologia, through objects, images, actions, are all historically and factually grounded before writing a subjective fiction. The exhibition in itself is a fiction walked in by the visitor, physically and conceptually encountering hypothetical places, unclear pre-historical and historical eras, leading the visitor all the way up to today. Those artists are creators of vestiges that will certainly puzzle future archaeologists. But they also will bring them precious information on the importance of history, archaeology and geology in early 21st century art.

From 14.09.2013 to 21.12.2013 : 40mcube, Musée des beaux-arts de Rennes, Musée de géologie de l’Université de Rennes 1.
From 14.09.2013 to 24.12.2013 : Frac Bretagne

Opening: 5:00 PM Geology Museum / 6:00 PM 40mcube / 6:30 PM Fine Arts Museum / 7:00 PM Frac Bretagne

Practical information :

40mcube
48, avenue Sergent-Maginot
f-35000 Rennes
Phone: +33 (0)2 90 09 64 11
From Tuesday to Saturday from 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM
Free access
Groups welcome free of charge on reservation

Frac Bretagne
19, avenue André Mussat
CS 81123
35011 Rennes cedex
Phone: +33 (0)2 99 37 37 93
Tuesday to Sunday from 12:00 AM to 7:00 PM
Full price: 3 € – Reduced price: 2 €.
Free: under 26 years old and jobseekers

Musée des beaux-arts
20, quai Émile Zola
35000 Rennes
Phone: +33 (0)2 23 62 17 45
Tuesday from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM and Wednesday to Sunday from 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM and 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM.
Full price : 5 € – Reduced price : 3 €
Free: under 18 years old, beneficiaries of the minimum social benefits, and on the 1st Sunday of each month.

Musée de géologie de l’Université de Rennes 1
Campus de Beaulieu, bâtiment 5
263, avenue du Général Leclerc
35000 Rennes
Phone: +33 (0)2 23 23 60 74
Monday to Friday from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM
Free access