Le réel, nouvel opium ? Group Show at Galerie des Filles du Calvaire

The collective est-ce une bonne nouvelle organized the exhibition 'Le réel, nouvel opium ?' at Galerie des Filles du Calvaire in Paris from February 4 to 27, 2010. The show engaged with the contemporary critical discourse on 'the real,' referencing Roland Barthes' 'effet de réel' and Slavoj Žižek's 'passion du réel' following Alain Badiou. Eleven writers contributed texts relating to the artworks. The video selection featured Daniel Lê's films on Nazism using archive and witness testimony, Taysir Batnij's slideshow of displaced people between Cairo and Rafah with inserted black voids, Éléonore de Montesquiou's film on a former uranium-producing Estonian town, Jérôme Game and Bertrand Wolff's abstract logorrhea, Françoise Parfait's video of wind noise, and Raphaël Boccanfuso's production of fake identity documents. The exhibition was criticized for minimal performance and advanced technology. Morad Montazami reviewed the show. Concurrently, 'Au-delà du réel' featuring Valérie Belin, George Condo, Fabrice Hyber, David Mach, and Bettina Rheims ran from February 5 to March 23 at Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont in Paris.