Text: Brendan Seibel Roma Tearne is a painter, an installation artist, a filmmaker and an author. Her comfort in a myriad of mediums, the exploration of complex emotions, and constant creative reinvention are probably honed by her background. Half-Tamil and half-Sinhalese she escaped to England with her parents, exiled by their families and forced to assimilatedinto a new culture as her homeland descended into half a century of conflict.
A successful visual artist, Tearne's decision to take up the pen fulfills a life long love affair with literature. Her first novel Mosquito was shortlisted for both the Costa First Novel Award and the Kiriyama Prize. Her follow-up Bone China, and most recent work Brixton Beach both garnered praise.
More on: Roma Tearne at Shakespeare & Co.
Text: Rooksana Hossenally
Photo: Kleinefenn. Art Home
The Palais de Tokyo has teamed up with an unlikely partner to create Nomiya, a floating experience to be relished up close to the heavens amongst Paris’ unique skyline. Replacing the Everland hotel room, the previous project that sat on the Palais de Tokyo rooftop, the contemporary art museum has now turned to collaboration with Electrolux, the Swedish electrical appliances manufacturer, to give its visitors an exclusive slick and sophisticated restaurant concept.
Based on the tiny bars lining Japanese streets, hence its name, Nomiya is a small rectangular capsule with a table for twelve guests, designed to open the channels of communication between strangers. The floating restaurant melts into the Parisian skyline no matter the time of day: at lunchtime the capsule of glass and steel offers a bright, weightless atmosphere reflected in its white walls and clean minimalistic lines, adorned by great big bay windows letting Paris seep through the room. The views of the Quai Branly Museum and the Eiffel Tower are needless to say, breathtaking. The evenings are quite different: Nomiya is transformed as it is bathed in an almost fluorescent purple light. Its main feature becomes the Parisian nightscape dotted with tiny lights and of course, the Eiffel Tower shimmying in a sequin blazer as it watches over the French capital.
More on: Nomiya: A Floating Table on the Parisian Skyline
Text and photo: Sarah Braasch
Ni Putes Ni Soumises (NPNS -- Neither Whores Nor Submissives) organized a rally in defense of women’s rights, at the Place de la République, in Paris, France, on Saturday, March 6, 2010, at 12 pm. NPNS is an international human rights organization that advocates on behalf of women’s rights as universal human rights without compromise. Two professional rock climbers draped a giant burqa over the “Equality” pedestal figure of the Marianne statue in the center of the Place de la République. All of the participants dressed as Marianne in her distinctive, red Phrygian liberty cap. Marianne is the national icon and symbol of the French Republic’s foundational values of liberty and equality. The rally was held in honor of International Women’s Day on March 8, 2010. The President of Ni Putes Ni Soumises, Sihem Habchi, roused the crowd with a speech. She proclaimed, “For this generation, the crucial issues are secularism, gender equality and gender desegregation, in order to create a feminist movement based upon living together in harmony throughout the world, and not only in France.”
More on: Ni Putes Ni Soumises Dresses Marianne in a Burqa
Text: Tiffany Tang
Photo: Bathroom designed by Armand Albert Rateau
Situated in Louvre’s nineteenth-century Rohan and Marsan wings is the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, a museum of decorative art and design that houses over 150,000 objects, showcasing collections of antiquities and modern designs from the Middle Ages to the present day. The collections encompass a vast diversity of decorative objects including furniture, tableware, carpets, stained glass, wallpaper and porcelain. This diversity is a testament to the quintessence of the French art of living from the ancient times, as well as sophistication in craftsmanship and creativity.
More on: Musée des Arts Décoratifs
Text: Brendan Seibel
Girl groups from the swinging 60's were a dime a dozen. Record labels paired songwriters with producers, handpicked the voices, and stylists went to work creating a palatable package ready for eager consumers. Parisian starlets The Plastiscines may not have been assembled by executives, but their rise in popularity comes from modern mechanisms pioneered decades ago. A group of middle class teens who could double as models, the band was guaranteed attention from their first struggling chords. Nylon Magazine launched a record label to release the debut album, grooming their flagship act for the media blitz to come. First France, then Europe and finally the States were invaded, The Plastiscines appearance on TV demographic hot-spot Gossip Girls as profound a victory as D-Day.
More on: The Plastiscines at La Maroquinerie
Text: Joanna Bronowicka
This Thursday, March 11, Théâtre de l’Odéon will host Slavoj Žižek, undoubtedly the most eccentric figure in contemporary philosophy. Originally from Slovenia, Žižek is a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana and a professor at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, but he is often associated Paris VIII and philosophers Alain Badiou and Jaques Ranciere. A declared atheist, who claims that “churches should be turned into
grain silos or palaces of culture," he will give a lectured entitled Christianity
between perversion and subversion.
The growing popularity of Žižek cannot be explained by the accessibility of his writings - he mixes theories of Marx, Hegel and Lacan with references to the latest blockbusters or political scandals in an almost hallucinatory style. Witty and full of unpredictable twists and turns, his public lectures make philosophy a form of entertainment.
More on: Events at Théâtre de l'Odéon : Žižek, Ndiaye and Disiz
Text: Florian Holtzente
Théâtre du Soleil is one of the last institutions in Paris devoted whole-heartedly to dreamers and idealists. Arianne Mnouchkine, the company’s septuagenarian director, combines mime, improvisation, Japanese theater and her own warm and fuzzy brand of utopian socialism to create art experiences that aim to undermine bourgeois exclusivity and awaken a spirit of brotherhood and delight in her public. To what extent she succeeds in her new piece, Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir, is up for grabs, but no one can deny that she does a hell of a job trying.
More on: Les Naufragés du Fol Espoir at Théâtre du Soleil
Text: Brendain Seibel
When Jeanne Cherhal burst onto the music scene a decade ago she had already perfected enfant terrible persona. Embodying the middle class, parochial ideal her unhinged presence behind the keys must have shocked early audiences, exacting an unattributed revenge through musical tantrums. Her debut album, a live recording, perfectly revealed the intelligence and passion of a young prodigy, skillfully playing her admirers for laughs and applause.
By the release of her first studio album Cherhal had either tired of being packaged as a precocious cabaret brat or was dragged into the corporate image machine. Backed by a band and relying on light pop-rock structures the Nantes artist seemed consumed with distancing herself from the prancing pianist who had formerly inhabited her skin. Tongue-twisting, breathless rants percolated from time to time, but deft artistry was buried in radio-friendly ditties. Sophisticated jazz licks across the ivories could not save her from makeovers and press junkets. The only signs of life slumbering beneath the klieg lights and powder were live appearances where, although playing stripped down renditions of her pop-tart flirtations, a little fire remained burning.
More on: Jeanne Cherhal at Bataclan
Text: Mabli Jones
Next week, the Musée des Beaux Arts at the Petit Palais opens its first ever exhibition dedicated to haute couture; it is fitting then, that it should be a retrospective of the work of a man who embodied the ideal of fashion designer as artist like no other, France’s beloved adopted son and last great couturier: Yves Saint Laurent.
Charting his lifetime’s work through a selection of over 300 original creations, from his beginnings at Dior, through the height of his experimentalism during the 70s, to his later refined exoticism; the exhibition celebrates the astounding range and beauty of his accomplishment, both technical and artistic.
More on: Yves Saint Laurent at the Petit Palais
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