Third Form (Prospectus vol. 1)
publication by Vincent Meessen
with the support of Cera Partners in Art
presented on the occasion of the solo exhibition My Last Life
at FRAC Aquitaine, Bordeaux, France
Third Form
The publication Third Form is a monography on My Last Life, an exhibition project by Vincent Meessen including his film Vita Nova that has received international critical acclaim and continues to travel. The publication will be launched on the occasion of Vincent Meessen’s solo presentation of My Last Life at FRAC Aquitaine in Bordeaux from May 22 to August 31, 2015. The exhibition takes place in the framework of Lumières de Barthes, an exhibition project celebrating the centenary of Roland Barthes’s birth.
Contributing authors to the publication are:
Peter Bloom
T.J. Demos
Olivier Marboeuf
Cuauhtémoc Medina
Vincent Meessen
Design by Speculoos, Brussels: Pierre Huyghebaert and Delphine Platteeuw.
ISBN 978-88-6749-173-5
The book costs 25 euro, excluding shipment costs
To order a copy, please contact Jubilee on info@jubilee-art.org
My Last Life
The solo exhibition My Last Life by Vincent Meessen has been presented in various institutions between 2011-2015.
As its starting point, the exhibition uses the cover of Paris Match, issue 326, published in 1955, which depicts a colonial cadet performing a military salute. Roland Barthes famously wrote about this cover in his Mythologies, published in the late fifties. Vincent Meessen borrows the French thinker’s open ended thread and speculates on the possible reasons that motivated Barthes to choose that particular picture. Meessen uses codes both from realism and narrative storytelling in order to construct a case study on the haunting mythography of colonial modernity.
Thanks to a poetic and critical rereading of some of Barthes texts, Meessen is also able to emphasise their conceptual and formal scope. Mediated by the artworks (video, text, sculpture, photographs, documents) “Herbé” and the visitors are included in this speculative narrative, escaping the restrictions of truth that are imposed by the format of critical discourse.
More information
More information on My Last Life.
Press Release Frac Aquitaine (in French).