“Taking its inspiration from war museums, official or spontaneous monuments and political communication, ‘The Enemy of my Enemy’ examines representations of power and the ambiguous position of the artist in the variety of modern discourses, between desires for autonomy, servitude and propaganda. Overall, it forms a complex display, associating objects, images, artefacts and documents, put into a relationship with other artists’ works.

‘The Enemy of my Enemy’ is a chaotic and partial depiction of how history is written in an era of globalisation and late capitalism. Even if war is not the subject of the show, it is one of its guiding lights, as the momentary suspension of objectivity to be replaced by necessity, and symmetry to be replaced by strategy, directly connecting tactics with affects, while remaining, in the words of Carl von Clausewitz, the ‘continuation of politics by other means’. It is a metaphor for the need to inform, in the sense of ‘giving form’ so as to instruct and guide when it comes to constructing a uniting narrative. Armed conflict is thus a metaphor for a world that aspires officially to peace, but whose cultural, economic and social structure is made up of real and symbolic violence.

With heroics, failures and the faking of official depictions, blackmail empathy, the forgetting of ideologies and figurations of violence, misappropriations of relics, the asymmetry of combats, but also homages to certain positions which can be admirable, even in their contradictions, ‘The Enemy of my Enemy’ takes part in the complexity of claims, rather than controlling them, by coldly playing out modern propaganda discourses and strategies. Rejecting any black and white view, it displays a multiplicity of viewpoints, and displays a constant mobility of readings and meanings, both physically and metaphorically.”
Guillaume Désanges