Coup double at Frac Aquitaine Explores Duplication and Repetition

The exhibition 'Coup double' at Frac Aquitaine in Bordeaux, curated by Claire Jacquet, ran from January 18 to April 21, 2012. It featured works by Roman Signer, Pauline Bastard, Ryan Gander, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Haim Steinbach, Gabriel Orozco, Jane Harris, Jean Sabrier, Ulla Von Brandenburg, Hans-Peter Feldmann, and Rineke Dijkstra. The show examined themes of the double, equivalence, theatricality, narcissism, annihilation, and sexual ambiguity through pairings, copies, and recurrences. Signer's black-and-white photograph captured a plastic bag filled with water, both liquid and solid, hung between two trees. Bastard created mountain sequences from torn images. Gander placed two identical bronze kneeling female sculptures facing each other, paired with white pedestals and blue cubes. The exhibition was structured around motifs of the mirror (Gonzalez-Foerster's symmetrical arrangements, Steinbach's double shelf), the ricochet (Orozco's yellow scooters, Harris's ellipses, Sabrier's stereograms), the duel (Von Brandenburg's curtains, Feldmann's hollowed faces), and the chrysalis (Dijkstra's teenagers in discotheques). 'Coup double' highlighted the inherent contradiction in repetition: a desire to disrupt the original through intensification and revitalization, while confronting time, finitude, and the anxiety of an endpoint.