home ?
De Babylone en Babylones, de Gulbenkian à Blade Runner
Where is
Arnaud Cohen
Curated by Paul Ardenne
Exhibition from June 20 to July 7, 2025
Meeting with Arnaud Cohen and Paul Ardenne on June 19 at 5 PM
Born in 1968, Arnaud Cohen is a Franco-Portuguese artist who lives and works between France, Spain and Portugal. Presented by Valérie Duponchelle as one of the ten personalities who reinvent culture (Le Figaro, Feb. 2015), he is a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors in London.
Arnaud Cohen confronts his work with his two main obsessions, that of individual responsibility in building collective destinies, and that of a memory between erasure and permanent recomposition. He chose to question the present and the future with tools forged in the materiality of the past. He indeed draws his formal inspiration from architecture and in particular from the practice of reuse. This practice is the only one in his opinion that is satisfactory from an ecological point of view. In the background, the artist refers as much to the Situationists and to Édouard Glissant as to allegories and mythology. His appropriationist practice leads him towards social and aesthetic forms as diverse as a foundation, a dance floor or an assembly of historical remains.
Mythologized origins, otherness and rejection built on invisible criteria, desire to escape towards an idealized haven, movement as the only invariant of an identity in permanent reconstruction. Euphrates, Bosphorus, Tagus. In a finite world, accept in consciousness, a transgenerational awareness, to swim in the same river that is never the same river.
Where is Home? This photographic series holds here in nine photos. Their order does not follow the narration and does not obey an aesthetic ordering criterion of symmetry.
What I write below is neither a statement nor a kind of guide, it’s just true or false leads delivered to the viewers' sagacity.
From left to right in the exhibition, we find the following images, numbered from 1 to 9 :
1 - "My" postcard of Lisbon, photo taken on the occasion of one of my touristic trips there. Discoveries ten years ago when Portugal was considering offering Portuguese nationality to "its Jews" who had fled the Inquisition at the end of the 16th century, the banks of the Tagus instantly powerfully reminded me of the shores of the Bosphorus on which my family, fleeing Spain then Portugal, had taken refuge and established itself until the early 1920s (and the creation of Turkey on the rejection of its minorities and the Armenian genocide).
2 - A view of the Tagus taken from the plane that takes me to Portugal to emigrate there.
3 - October 2016. In my Parisian apartment, dilapidated by several water damages, in the foreground, on the coffee table, arranged in disorder, the different elements necessary for the constitution of my file of Portuguese naturalization. Family trees, identity photos, blank French civil status locker, French passport, etc. In the background at the center right of the image, we see the white sofa with blue cushions from my conceptual work ASFI, hub with airport spirit where international curators meet to exchange and build a support network in a world where the freedom of demonstration is constantly declining (migrant work deployed at the Akart biennales, in Cairo, BIENALSUR in Buenos Aires and Venice with Switzerland, but also at the Tate St Ives and presented at the Pompidou Centre as part of Museum on/off). On the back wall, a photo of this same room while the Blade Runner film is projected onto the back wall. Mise en abyme. Chosen moment of the film: a replicant, human being created as an adult in a laboratory by the scientific genius and tycoon of tech Eldon Tyrell. Slave of the "colonies of space" like all replicants, she escaped with some companions. Their goal in returning to Earth where they were created: to meet Tyrell so that he extends, they hope, their programmed lifespan to four years. They only have a few days left to live.
4 - October 2016. In my Parisian apartment, projected on the back wall of my living room, Blade Runner. This photo captures the moment in the film when Pris, arriving on earth in Los Angeles, tries to get in touch with JF Sebastian, Tyrell’s right hand man. To cajole him, get hosted by him and use him to meet Tyrell. she is about to announce to him in the following sequence: "I have no home".
5 - I found my new home. To fit into my budget, I had to take a risk: buy a walled property without knowing either the interior condition or the content. When I finally enter it, armed with a crowbar and a big screwdriver, I discover that the lieumuré was a squat where prostitution and drug taking took place on soiled mattresses in rooms with a gutted ceiling. On the ground, a multitude of vestiges of this previous occupation, miserable. Other migrants infinitely more to be pitied than me had found refuge, slave labor and forgetting an unbearable present, within these walls.
6 - October 2016. Still in my old Parisian apartment, projected on the back wall of my living room, Blade Runner. This photo captures another moment of the film: we are at JF Sebastian’s place. JF is a young man who seems very old because he has Methuselah syndrome. Due to his illness, he is one of the few young men who did not leave Earth for space. Condemned to never be able to leave LA, he lives alone in a building whose degradation, the neoclassical remains and the light echo mine so well that the two spaces seem to merge. On my side, carrying within me centuries of migrations, I seem as old as Methuselah in the body of a young man.
7 - October 2016. Still in my old Parisian apartment, projected on the back wall of my living room, Blade Runner. This photo captures another moment of the film: we are at Rick Deckard’s in Los Angeles. In his apartment there are many family photos which constitute a form of genealogy. Deckard is a hunter of replicants as there were in Europe hunters of Jews during the Nazi period. His mission is to track them down and eliminate them. In this sequence, he analyzes a souvenir photo of a replica that he is hunting. There is therefore, as in photo number 3, for the viewer who tries to analyze the image offered to him, a mise en abyme of a photo of a photo itself analyzed by Deckard. At the end of the film, we will learn, with this latter, that he is in fact himself “even a replicant who ignores himself. To better manipulate him, Tyrell has indeed implanted in Deckard’s brain the childhood memories of a human.
8 - From my new home in Lisbon, far from the ideal view of the postcard of my dreams, I can nevertheless, from one of my windows, provided that I hoist myself on tiptoe, guess more than see, through the foliage of trees, the Tagus and a small fragment of the other shore.
9 - The district of Pera in Constantinople, view of the Bosphorus (Tophana pier). Engraving of 1838, drawing by Thomas Allom, engraver J. Sands. From the book Constantinople and its Environs, by Robert Walsh. By its hills that border it, by its width, by its light in summer, by its bus boats that go from one bank to another, the Tagus inevitably makes think of the Bosphorus to which it comes. It was for me as much a shock as an evidence because during my childhood and adolescence I went several times to Istanbul to meet the first cousins of my father and their children. It was in Lisbon during my first trip that I discovered the existence and journey of Calouste Gulbenkian. Armenian billionaire from Constantinople, he fled the genocide and takes refuge with his immense fortune and his exceptional art collections in Paris. My family, considering that the fate reserved for the Armenians by the Turks is only the appetizer, and that Greeks, Kurds, and Jews will be next to be exterminated, makes the same journey. When the Nazis arrive in Paris twenty years later, in 1940, if my family does not have the means to flee, Gulbenkian takes refuge in Vichy and then in Lisbon, in 1942. Immediately captivated by the similarity between the landscape of the Tagus and that of the Bosphorus, he settled there and died in 1955. He leaves his immense collections to a foundation that today bears his name.
Arnaud Cohen