COSMOS
2001
Solo shows, Palais de Tokyo & Kunstverein Freiburg

Two hundred empty videocassette cases are laid out on a forty-meter linear shelf. The covers, whose visual codes borrow from a wide variety of film genres, are all different, but each film is invariably entitled Cosmos and directed by Boris Achour. The credits feature a wide variety of names: actors, artists, writers, musicians, philosophers and friends. The title is taken from a novel by Witold Gombrowicz, which the writer describes as “an attempt to organize chaos”. Just as each empty box evokes an imaginary film adaptation of Gombrowicz’s novel, the Cosmos ensemble is an adaptation of the novel in the form of a sculpture.
(On Boris Achour’s interest in lines, see Émilie Renard’s text Many coloured hens placed side by side…)