The City Front: Benoît Fougeirol

Galerie Maria Wettergren is pleased to present the exhibition The City Front by the French artist and photographer Benoît Fougerol. Through a series of works made betweeen 2002 and 2015 in the ZUS areas (Sensitive Urban Zones) of the Parisian suburbs, Benoît Fougeirol offers us a cartographic, toponymic and photographic inventory of the Sensitive Urban Zones, the Zus, on the outskirts of Paris, in order to interrogate their representations. A selection of seven silver print photos, 5 big and 2 small, as well as an installation Tentative d'Epuisement ("Attempted Exhaustion") form the core of the exhibition. The latter work, with it's title borrowed from Georges Perec, is the fruit of an important topographic research carried out by the artist between 2013 and 2014, composed of a map (drawn from a score of ZUS operations carried out by the National Agency for Urban Renovation in Seine-Saint-Denis); a text, composed from all the street names forming the parameter of these areas, like an administrative poem, pasted to the wall; and a slide show of black and white documentary photographs of these front lines, between city and city, zone and Suburbs, between what would be sensible, and what would not be.