Saturday, February 14, 2009

Le Laboratoire



Le Laboratoire
Le Laboratoire, located in Paris's first arrondissement, invites the public to experience the creative process that drives innovation and value in culture as in industry, society, and education as a fusion of art and of science producing tangible – if transient – art and design outcomes. These outco¬mes or "works-in-progress" result from experiments conceived of and led by leading international artists in collaboration with leading international scientists. Le Lab is a kind of off-Broadway, or pre-museum, aiming to catalyze change in culture, industry, society and education with partners who invest in the exploration process more decidedly than in the guarantee of any outcome this process might produce.

Current exhibition
As part of its new exhibition/experiment, Le Laboratoire has invited the Indian artist Shil¬pa Gupta to explore universal themes: fear and prejudice.

This project, prepared with the psychologist Mahzarin Banaji (Harvard professor) explo¬res the power of images and situations as expressed by the behavior of individuals. 

Introduction by Shilpa Gupta : 
"
While I Sleep is an about the multilayered alterations that take place in human perception when there is a drop in consciousness of ones self, or our collective vision. As Prof Banaji says, 'There is a fundamental fracture between what is in our heads and what we know about it'. 

Having always been concerned with 'what we see' and 'how we see' am also interested in misunderstandings and structures via which information gets transacted – especially in a highly mediated landscape as the world today, especially in an atmosphere where at one hand we seek to collapse distances rapidly, where as the other, there has been a simultaneous rise of suspicion and heightened security. 

A large part of the human action operates via the sub conscious, some physiologists claim up to 90%! And so in a seemingly largely seemingly democratic world where nation states have set progressive constitutions in place, pledging equality to all irrespective of gender, race and religion, people continue to harbor values of difference governed by deep rooted prejudices which dangerously be in fact be quite invisible even to ourselves (Banaji) 

The exhibition explores these gaps in consciousness be it in the individual or the nation state where desire blinds itself metamorphosing into desperate greed, curtailing the natural movement of people socially, politically and economically."

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