The Frac Bourgogne — Burgundy’s Regional Contemporary Art Collection — is launching the magazine Pause in April 2008 to lend added visibility to the intellectual exchanges which represent the basis for any artistic and cultural project and contribute to the various debates informing the art scene, national and international alike.

Putting a collection together, showing it in different venues, working with artists on a long-term basis, and producing works and exhibitions, all this calls for a critical line of thinking which is attested to after the fact by editorial policy. Posters, artist’s books, and catalogues for solo and group shows published by the FRAC Bourgogne are invariably the product of a line of thinking developed after the event represented by the exhibition, acquisition, and/or production of a work of art. There is the time required for selecting authors and publishing and editorial partners; there is the understanding necessary for grasping the far-reaching links between works belonging to one and the same set or ensemble; there is the appearance of hitherto unseen forms of coherence within the collection, and there is the invitation to produce other forms of discourse on art in order to incorporate things that are different and eclectic. The FRAC Bourgogne is keen to describe this slow process of maturation that involves a new kind of thinking.

Pause is a bilingual (French/English) magazine which will appear three times a year.
For each number two authors will be invited to prepare an essay on an issue raised by recent Frac Bourgogne acquisitions and exhibitions. The choice of authors will not, if deemed pertinent, preclude inviting persons engaged in research in other disciplines (architecture, city planning, anthropology…).

Full-page illustrations will be part and parcel of the magazine and on the back cover. They may be selected by artists or any other member of the editorial staff. Their brief is not necessarily to illustrate the arguments of the authors, but rather to propose another response to the theme being broached.The first issue of this new magazine is titled Generational. It will be devoted to Knut Åsdam (born in 1968 in Trondheim, Norway) and Johanna Billing (born in 1973 in Jönköping, Sweden), who have respectively had exhibitions organized by the Frac Bourgogne; the collection has works by both artists, too.

Generational may refer to questions peculiar to a particular generation, but such questions in the case of these two quite different artists do not perhaps differ from those peculiar to earlier generations of “critical” artists, in the way they decipher different forms of domination and the way they challenge conventional landmarks. On the other hand, they are expressed against backdrops of disarray, indecisiveness, oddity, and fragility assumed in the face of instructions issued by the dominant social interplay, and different from this angle from the more declaratory and overtly denunciatory procedures of the “critical” forms of praxis of the early 1980s, and also of certain of their contemporary “activist” counterparts, at loggerheads with the city, and with matters involving freedom and public space.

Johanna Billing and Knut Åsdam elect to get their ideas across by way of more traditional channels (film, exhibition rooms), and by way of languages and illustrative material that are accessible to persons who are not initiated in contemporary art and its references.The subject of Knut Åsdam’s fiction films is the city and its all- encompassing effects, where disarray is expressed through snippets of stories of characters caught in urban architecture and layouts which do not help them to extricate themselves—they are prisoners in the middle of a ceaseless ebb and flow of urban activities, where they are as if “frozen”, and quite incapable of saying so in words.

Johanna Billing’s films introduce current situations with which we can all identify—situations which describe not so much disarray as a certain indecisiveness, hope and the loss of all illusion, which is often attributed to a generation born between the late 1960s and the mid-1970s, which is not necessarily projected in dominant existential outlooks.

Eva González-Sancho & Frédéric Oyharçabal
Translated by Simon Pleasance


Authors in the first issue:

Eric Chauvier (born in 1971 in Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche, France) is an anthropologist, who lectures at Victor Ségalen University, Bordeaux 2. He is the author of Si l’enfant ne réagit pas, Editions Allia, 2008; Anthropolgie, Editions Allia, 2006; Profession anthropologue, William Blake & Co, Bordeaux, 2004; Fiction familial: Approche anthropolinguistique de l’ordinaire d’une famille, Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, Bordeaux, 2003.
He is currently working on the perception of industrial hazards.

Chus Martínez (born in 1972 in Ponteceso, Spain) is an art critic and exhibition curator, and director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein, after organizing the Sala Rekalde exhibitions in Bilbao between 2002 and 2005, and running the Lowest Common Denominatori programme, Sala Montcada, "La Caixa" Foundation, Barcelona, between 2001 and 2002. She is a frequent contributor to various international magazines and exhibition catalogues. In particular she contributed to the publication about Tere Recarens, Heitere Weitere Polterei, published by the FRAC Bourgogne in 2005.

Published by:

• Frac Bourgogne (Fonds régional d’art contemporain de Bourgogne) – Dijon.

With the backing of:

• Ministry of Culture and Communications (Regional Cultural Affairs Department, Burgundy)
• Burgundy Regional Council
• Côte d’or General Council

Editor: Eva González-Sancho
Editorial board: Eva González-Sancho & Frédéric Oyharçabal
Graphic design: www.bisdixit.com
Joint production: Frac Bourgogne, Dijon; Bis, Barcelona, Spain