Mimosa Echard, Sporal
Comenduirea Garnizoanei, Timișoara — June 6-July 14, 2024
The work Sporal[1] pursues Mimosa Echard’s research began in 2019 whilst a resident at the Villa Kujoyama (Kyoto), which centers on the idea that myxomycetes, unicellular organisms that are at the intersection of the animal, plant and fungi kingdoms, may be endowed with a form of memory.
Sporal, presented in 2022 in Palais de Tokyo in Paris, is composed of a hanging patchwork on which is projected an audiovisual montage based on the eponymous video game[2] conceived in collaboration with developer Andréa Sardin and artist Aodhan Madden. The game invites visitors to explore the cavities of an organism in a perpetual state of transformation, inspired by the life cycle of the myxomycete. A character with an ambiguous identity makes their way through an ambiguous, dreamlike universe evolving with each encounter and in reaction to the mutating materials that surround them. With each enigma solved and each exchange of fluids, the character unlocks sexual types like those released by myxomycetes, which can deploy up to 720 different kinds.
The materials that make up the patchwork are meanwhile drawn from a multitude of sources, sites and gestures that are superimposed here, fusing organic and industrial materials sourced online or found in the artist’s studio. Mimosa Echard has proposed an experimental, psychedelic environment where phases of latency alternate with bursts of vitality.
[1] Sporal: (biology) relative to spores, reproductive cells found in most cryptogamic organisms as well as in certain protozoans (Encyclopedia Universalis online).
[2] The video game “Sporal” is freely available online (www.sporal.net).
Mimosa Echard was born in 1986 in Alès, France. She lives and works in Paris.
Mimosa Echard draws from research in biology, in the history of experimental cinema, and her personal biography to create works that blend sexuality, perception, and artifice.
Working across various mediums - from sculpture to installation to video games - her work is guided by continuous and contradictory processes of absorption, accumulation, and circulation observed in diverse domains such as popular cultures, metabolic systems, or electromagnetic phenomena. Her practice is inspired by the creation of hybrid eco-systems where the living and the non-living, the human and the non-human coexist. Her works explore areas of contact and contamination between the organic objects and consumer items — elements that can be perceived as ambivalent or even contradictory through our cultural conventions.
Attentive to the invisible - or latent - potential of the materials she employs, her assemblages and installations question the capacity of language to grasp her objects, thereby allowing the proliferation of novel and non-normative associations.
At the core of the artist’s compositions and installations, medicinal plants collected in her garden or from the inhabitants of her native village create a symbiosis with the cosmetic products or electronic components.
Towards this work by Mimosa Echard, the gaze is first surprised by the heterogeneous objects, before being seized by a secret relationship between forms and materials. Gradually, the community of forms, materials and objects emancipates from the artist’s hand, becomes fluid and autonomous.
Mimosa Echard is the winner of the 2022 Marcel Duchamp Prize.
She has been the subject of exhibitions within international institutions such as the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2022); Collection Lambert, Avignon (2021-2020); musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris (2020); Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2020); Centre d'Art contemporain d'Ivry — Le Crédac, Ivry (2020); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2017); Dortmunder Kunstverein, Dortmund (2019); Platform-L Contemporary Art Center, Seoul (2018); Cell Project Space Gallery, London (2017); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2013); Mains d'œuvres, Saint-Ouen (2012).
Her works are included, among others, in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; MAC VAL; CNAP — Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris; musée d'Art moderne de Paris; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris; Sadami Art Foundation, Dhaka; Ettore Fico Foundation, Turin; Collection IAC — Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes; FRAC Corse; FRAC Bourgogne; FRAC Ile-de-France, Paris.