Mircea Cantor

In 1999, Robert Fleck, then director of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, discovered the work of this student from the Cluj Academy of Fine Arts, during a trip to Romania. Mircea Cantor was then invited to Nantes for a post-graduate program, where he lived for several years.

Twenty years on, the work that forms the starting point for this exhibition is a photograph taken in Nantes in 2000, All the directions. In it, the artist holds a completely white sign evoking a ghostly destination. The image, not without rebellion, is also tinged with a certain melancholy, a form of disenchantment. This duality lies at the heart of many of the artist's works, as she calls herself a "world artist", questioning notions of identity, ethics, politics, contemporary reality and their contradictions.

Two works from 2018 entitled Adjective to your presence are associated with it. One is a film made in Tokyo featuring Japanese demonstrators carrying transparent Plexiglas signs. The second is a set of signs arranged along a wall. A film, a trace and a memory thus come together in the Chapelle de l'Oratoire to illustrate the Romanian word Înainte, whose ambiguous meaning means, depending on the context, "forward" or "as before".

Mircea Cantor

Born in Romania in 1977, Mircea Cantor lives and works on Earth. He won the Prix Marcel Duchamp in 2011, and the Prix d'entreprise Ricard in 2004. His works are included in prestigious collections such as those of the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou and Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris; MoMA, New York; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Rennie Collection, Vancouver; Castello di Rivoli, Turin.