Theaster Gates:
Le chant du centre

For the last twenty years, artist Theaster Gates has expanded the field of contemporary art and pushed us to reconsider the canon through materials. Trained as an urban planner and a sculptor whose primary medium is clay, Gates has dedicated a significant part of his practice to reflecting on the relationships between space, craft, and the cultural specificities of traditions that shape one’s artistic trajectory.

For this year’s project, Le chant du centre [The Song of the Center], Gates’s intervention transforms La Grande Halle into a clay manufacturing workshop where visitors are invited into the artist’s production and sculptural research. Gates creates a sacred space around the Temple, a central installation made from pottery ware-boards presenting his vinyl collection, a bar, and ceramic and neon artworks. Together, these elements are a testament to the performance, production and proposal inherent in ceramic futures, or what Gates refers to as the “museological, political, and social possibilities” of honoring clay’s ability as both a functional and sculptural gateway in the fine arts. 

About Le chant du centre, Gates says: “Craft, to me, is interesting, but the political deployment of craft, the performativity of craft, the consumerism caused by craft, is where craft becomes instrumentalized to stand in for other social and economic ambitions. It is my desire to exhaust the questions within myself about the colonialization that happens over the hand. Through this project, I interrogate my own faculty around what craft means, for whom I want it to have meaning and, quite possibly, its meaninglessness.” 

The workshop space honors the craft traditions of Senegalese, Malian, Korean, and Chinese workshops, where collectives of people work together to produce a particular style of making. In this spirit, Gates and LUMA Arles have built in Camargue a traditional Anagama – a variation of a Korean kiln introduced to Japan in the fifth century – which will be fired for five to seven days at a time during the course of the project. The kiln serves as a site of research and production, using the region’s primary natural elements: timber, rice husk, and salt.

Conceived as a durational and demonstrative installation, Le chant du centre will be in constant evolution as new wares and sculptures are formed and fired, providing a different encounter with the work each visit. This conceptual and practical approach to the ceramic workshop explores the ways in which sculpture affects the body and the ways in which craft becomes a vehicle for understanding our human nature in relation to material processes.

Curated by Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, Director of Exhibitions and Programs and Chloé Bonnie More, Curator.

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