Omar in May

 

An exhibition by Vincent Meessen at Centre Pompidou, Paris


28 March – 28 May 2018

27 March: Opening, 18h (RSVP)

11 May: book presentation with panel discussion

 


Brussels-based artist Vincent Meessen (Baltimore, United States, 1971) has been developing work at the crossroads of visual art and research for fifteen years now. By reinvigorating long-forgotten signs, images and accounts, his works offer a poetic and polemic turn to History the way it is written. Using various media, ranging from the moving image to print, sound and archival documents, Meessen puts history to the test of the present.


At the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, Meessen represented Belgium with Personne et les autres (No-one and the others). With twelve guest artists from four continents, the exhibition critically harnessed just as many narratives, encounters, and forms that opposed the rigid matrix of colonial modernity – physically or mentally, in imagination, in revolution, or in reciprocity.


Omar in May bears a direct relationship with the critically acclaimed Belgian Pavilion. Indeed, it boasts a film version of One.Two.Three, the audiovisual work presented in Venice and recently acquired by the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP). It focuses on the role of Congolese students in the adventure of the Situationist International during the mid-sixties, both in Paris and in Brussels. In May ’68, one of them composed a protest song in Kikongo, one of the Congolese languages. Found in the archives of the Belgian situationist Raoul Vaneigem, this previously unknown composition has been revisited, through Meessen and its author, Joseph Mbelolo ya Mpiku in Kinshasa. Set to music by young local women in the legendary rumba club Un Deux Trois, the composition renewed the possible signification of social struggle while a popular uprising was violently repressed at the time of the shoot.


Resurfacing buried memories, other works in the exhibition problematize the reification of May ’68. Rather than a reiteration of a mythology confined to the Latin Quarter of Paris, other major uprisings that took place in Dakar and Kinshasa are at play here. In both cases, Vincent Meessen is interested in the unique itineraries of young African intellectuals who directly or indirectly crossed the Situationist International – that “specter that haunts the world” which left a mark equally radical as indelible on the world of ideas and forms.


A photograph of a young Senegalese student reading the latest issue of the Situationist magazine accompanies the visitor to Dakar. One of the works especially conceived for this exhibition is CinemaOmarx (2018), the first stage of Juste un Mouvement (2020), a ‘film in the making’. The formula is Jean-Luc Godard’s, and unpacks La Chinoise. In this 1967 film the same young student, Omar Blondin Diop, played his own role of Maoist revolutionary. Meessen takes Godard’s fiction to witness and asks whether this scenario didn’t become reality in Dakar, in 1971. That year, members of the group of the ‘Arsonists’ (Incendiaires), were sentenced for an attempt to attack the presidential convoy of the Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor and his childhood friend, the French president Georges Pompidou.


Curated by Catherine David, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne – Centre de création industrielle


Produced by Jubilee. With the support of: Argos, a/r, La Cambre arts visuels, Région Bretagne, Spectre, Vlaamse Gemeenschap, Wallonie Bruxelles International


 


PUBLICATION


On the occasion of the exhibition, Vincent Meessen has edited the publication The Other Country/L’Autre Pays, in collaboration with WIELS, contemporary art centre (Brussels), Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne (Paris) and Sternberg Press (Berlin). This work contains essays by Ruth Baumeister, Stefano Collicelli Cagol and Pedro Monaville, a dialogue between Tom McDonough and Vincent Meessen, a visual essay by Vincent Meessen and reprints or the first publication of texts by Guy Debord, Omar Blondin Diop and Ndjangani Lungela. With support by Jubilee – platform for artistic research, and a/r (art & recherche, Brussels).

 


CONVERSATION, BOOK LAUNCH, CINEMA SCREENING

Omar in Memoriam

Round table discussion with Catherine David (deputy director of Centre Pompidou and curator of Omar in May), Dialo Blondin Diop, and Vincent Meessen.

May 11, 2018, 18:30. Forum 1, Centre Pompidou. Free admission


On 11 May 1973, the lifeless body of the young Omar Blondin Diop, former May ’68 activist, was found in his cell at Gorée prison in Dakar. On the anniversary of his passing and in the context of Omar in May, Vincent Meessen’s exhibition at Centre Pompidou, the artist and the curator speak with Dialo Diop. He is one of the brothers of Omar Blondin Diop, former political activist, and former secretary general of the National Democratic Rally (RND), the party founded by Senegalese thinker Cheikh Anta Diop, equally a historical opponent of Senghor. In his youth, Dialo Diop was one of the members of the group of the so-called Incendiaires (‘arsonists’). He was sentenced to life for their violent opposition to the visit of Georges Pompidou in 1971.


How can subjective memories be formalized in the writing of a political history that was always hindered by those in power? How to escape a reification of collective memory, and extract from an incomplete mourning process prospects for emancipation today?


Before the conversation, there will be a unique cinema screening of Vincent Meessen’s film Juste Un Mouvement (2018). Free admission
11 May 2018, 17:30
Forum 1
Centre Pompidou

 

 


28 March – 28 May 2018
11-21h
4th floor – Galerie 0 – Espace Prospectif – Centre Pompidou, Paris


 

Visit the Centre Pompidou web page on Omar in May (French)