Société Réaliste's Empire, State, Building at Jeu de Paume

From March 1 to May 8, 2011, the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris hosted Empire, State, Building, an exhibition by the Franco-Hungarian duo Société Réaliste. The show immersed visitors in an environment of typographic, cartographic, numismatic, vexillological, astronomical, and architectural signs, presented through photographs, sculptures, digital prints, a film, a painting, and murals. Each element functioned as an enigmatic fragment of a larger whole to be deciphered. Conventional symbols like the dollar sign, zero, world maps, and alphabetical charts were transformed or combined with other signs. For instance, New Alphabetical Order proposed an aberrant alphabetical ordering of alphabetic and monetary signs based on Esperanto and indexed to the euro exchange rate. The exhibition deconstructed forms and models of sensory and symbolic organization of spaces and signs—flags, calendars, borders, currencies, monuments—through which power is produced and reproduced. This practice inherited from Art & Language and Öyvind Fahlström, combining critical materialism with utopian mysticism via pseudo-scientific methodologies and a satirical spirit. The exhibition ran until May 8, 2011.