Éric Baudelaire

Éric Baudelaire: make, do, with

5 December 2023

Éric Baudelaire’s works are often made in collaboration with the people whose experiences they explore — avant-garde artists, teenagers, secessionists and terrorists, all of whom have defied the institutions that assert the right to define the realities they live in. Their stories of resistance and entangled ethical choices are the material of Baudelaire’s films, and of an artistic practice that expands the films into broader display formats, often conceived as collective experiments. In this talk, Éric Baudelaire will share some of his projects, from his début documentary about the Japanese Red Army (The Anabasis, 2011), to his most recent research about parapsychological experiments conducted by his mother Isabelle in the late 1970s.

Éric Baudelaire is an artist and filmmaker based in Paris, France. After training as a political scientist, Baudelaire established himself as a visual artist with a research-based practice in several media ranging from photography and the moving image to installation, performance, and letter writing. His work probes a reality shaped by the systems of representation that structure contemporary societies: political, judicial, economic and informational constructs. His feature films are shown in festivals as well as exhibitions, where they are presented within broader installations that include other works, archival documents and extensive public programmes. He has exhibited at Centre Pompidou, Paris, MMK Frankfurt, Kunsthalle St Gallen, Museo Reina Sofia, Bergen Kunsthall, (formerly known as) Witte de With, Fridericianum, Beirut Art Center, and showed work in the Whitney Biennale, Sharjah Biennial, Yokohama Triennale, Mediacity Seoul, and Taipei Biennial. He was the recipient of the 2019 Marcel Duchamp prize, and recently published a monography titled Make, Do, With at Paraguay Press