Malachi Farrell – Qu’est-ce qui se passe chez xippas?

Malachi Farrell

Qu’est-ce qui se passe chez xippas?

25.10.00 09.12.00

Xippas Paris Past
Malachi Farrell, “Qu’est-ce qui se passe chez Xippas?”, 2000

Galerie Xippas is pleased to announce an exhibition of the young Irish artist Malachi Farrell, who is well known for his work based on a new language of traditional sculpture, environmental art, theater, and cinema. Fabricating mis en scène robotic installations, Farrell unfolds fables as contemporary art using the power of sound, lights, and the choreography of moving objects contructed with computer chips and electronics. His aim is to create an atmosphere of emotion and response with elements of humor and “naïveté”.
For his first exhibition at the gallery, Qu’est-ce qui se passe chez Xippas? will span the second floor; a new work made specifically for the U-shape of the space. Constructing a walkway of steel barriers, the artist re-creates Parisian streets where the visitors pass through different segments of society such as an assault of the paparazzi. Upon entering the space, an onslaught of voices bombard the spectator with questions on the death penalty while camera flashes blind the eyes, giving the visitor the experience of being on a stage as a politician or Hollywood actor. In his usual method, Farrell incorporates materials such as garbage, exposed electrical wires, and found everyday objects illustrating scenes of virtual ghosts of our urban life. Public space is depicted with the steel barriers raising the issue of protection and separation (i.e. who’s safe and who isn’t).

On the ground floor, the artist will install Fish Flag Mourant:  «Thirty or so fish, with skin of all different colours of flags are dying. In the middle, one of them lies sick in bed, hooked-up to an IV drip. Around it is a dried-up and polluted pond (frothy water and garbage), where its fellow fish are fighting death. Some have jumped out of the pond, while others have been fished out and hang there almost dead. The pollution of this body of water results from the confrontation between human and wild societies. The fish are both realistic (supple movements) and natural (smooth surface). Their finished appearances makes one think of manufactured educational toys that teach children how to recognize different nations. The flags give each fish an individuality and symbolize the abolition of frontiers in terms of pollution» (artist statement).

Malachi Farrell was born in 1970 in Dublin, Ireland and works and lives in Paris and Malakoff, France. After graduating from the Ecole de Beaux-Arts in Rouen, France and the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam he has exhibited extensively in Europe. He recently had one-person shows at La Ferme de Buisson, Noisiel, La Maison des Arts, Malakoff, and capc Musée, Bordeaux. This year he was included in numerous group exhibitions among others the Biennial of Turin, “Sans Souci” at the Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, and two residencies in “Côte Ouest” at UCSB, Santa Barbara and The San Francisco Art Institute. Farrell will participate in “Épifanie”, an upcoming exhibition curated by Jan Höet, S.M.A.K. Gent, in Heverlee, Belgium and Malachi Farrell: Give them an inch and they take a mile, a catalog of his work, will be published at the end of November with texts by Catherine Francblin and Christine Macel.

Artist

Malachi Farrell

Location

108 rue Vieille-du-Temple
75003 Paris, France

Press release

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