Mark Geffriaud

Paris-based, multi-disciplinary artist Mark Geffriaud works in installation, sculpture, film, photography, performance and writing. The situations he creates are intended to subvert the places where his work is shown. His primary tools are the architecture, functioning and stories of these spaces, but also the stories of their staff and visitors. Mark Geffriaud has shown his work in France and internationally, as part of solo shows (Plateau Frac Ile-de-France, Jeu de Paume, Mac Val, Palais de Tokyo, Witte de With) and group exhibitions including at Centre Pompidou (Paris), MAK Center (Los Angeles), Mamco (Geneva), National Gallery (Prague) and Artists Space (New York). He features in public collections in France (Centre Pompidou and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris) as well as the Ile-de-France, Aquitaine, Normandy and Lorraine regional collections.

In Japan, the growing number of abandoned wood houses – designed to be deconstructed and rebuilt an infinite number of times – releases a potential new resource. The re-use by architects, designers and artists of this material relies on the preservation of traditional carpentry skills and renews the need for a particular relationship with the environment. Once focused on the forest, the carpenter’s expertise is shifting towards a different type of practice, which presents different challenges. Using traditional methods of conservation to repurpose materials could reduce the construction industry’s need for wood from commercially grown forests; it could also pave the way for a different form of restoration: that of primary forests for non-commercial use. During his residency, Mark Geffriaud will continue a long-term project based on a similar premise to repurposing practices in Japan, namely mobility and reinterpretation as a means of conserving works, as opposed to immobilisation and preservation of their component parts. In doing so, he hopes to transform the relationship his work has with the places where it is presented and ask the same question – “How can we make more room?” – in a different way.

-1 © Martin Argyroglo, Deux mille quinze, 2016 projections synchronisées, obturateurs, voix off, vue d’exposition, Le Plateau — Frac Ile-de-France, Paris

-2 © Brice Pelleschi Shelter, (inventaire), 2014, vue d’exposition, Une lettre arrive toujours à destination(s), La Panacée, Montpellier

-3 © Aurélien Mole, Tes mais #1, 2023, page de livre encadrée et nitrate d’argent

-4 © Mark Geffriaud, Tes mais, 2023, porte dérobée menant à une salle accueillant une programmation aux heures de fermeture de la galerie (performance de Charly Bechaimont), vue d’exposition, galerie gb agency, Paris