Whatever you do, don’t call the critically acclaimed event Offscreen in Paris a “video art fair.” That, founder and artistic director Julien Frydman said while installing the exhibition last week, might break his heart. After all, Frydman—formerly the director of Paris Photo—helped found this alternative, nomadic “salon” in 2022 to escape what he described as pointless divisions between artistic mediums. He’d much rather visitors not know what to call the event, held from October 21 to 26, alongside Art Basel Paris. All Frydman cares about is that visitors come away with a moving experience.
Many have. Now in its fourth edition, Offscreen has quietly built a loyal following since its first iteration at the Salomon Rothschild Mansion, followed by last year’s edition in a brutalist car garage, where a tightly curated selection of artworks and installations placed still and moving images in wider art-historical context.
This year, Offscreen takes over the La Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière, a stark, imposing church on the grounds of a historic hospital on Paris’s Left Bank. The hospital was once used as a detention center for “degenerate” women beginning in the 17th century; by the 19th century, it had become a medical research center for “insane and incurable” women, including studies on hysteria. In the 1980s and ’90s, the chapel hosted monumental exhibitions by Anselm Kiefer, Nan Goldin, and Christian Boltanski as part of the Festival d’Automne.
This year, 28 artists represented by six French and 21 international galleries will be featured in the soaring space, where scattered paintings of the Virgin and Child hang alongside church organs and skylit domes. Artists range from unrepresented newcomer Urs Lüthi, to David Haxton, a pioneer of video imagery in the 1970s whose works are rarely shown, to rising art star Thu-Van Tran, and Shigeko Kubota (1937–2015), the late video-sculpture artist and feminist who is this year’s guest of honor.
Highlights include a durational performance by Maria Stamenković Herranz, who will build a spiral of bricks while blindfolded—only to destroy it on the salon’s closing date—as well as a new series of talks and museum acquisitions from the Centre Pompidou and ZKM (Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe). This year’s Offscreen promises to be another unforgettable—and likely indescribable—experience. Just as Frydman intends.
ARTnews sat down with Frydman ahead of Monday’s preview to discuss the evolution of Offscreen and its new venue.
This interview has been edited lightly for clarity and concision.
ARTnews: Why did you choose this location?
Frydman: When the possibility of this space came up, there was a lot of excitement, but also concern. How does one install artwork here? Will it be overwhelmed by the space itself? Will it find its own voice? But even independent of the history of this location, the building itself is inspiring.
That said, the Salpêtriere church has a unique history, notably related to the women imprisoned here, and the psychiatric and neurologic work done here. It’s not a neutral space. And while we have artworks that can resonate with that, it’s not the reason they were selected. The main reason we chose this location is that there is something that emerges, that contributes to the quality of the visitor’s experience, and in my view, does what art allows us to do — uplift us from our daily lives and inspire us to approach life differently, beyond purely factual elements.
The whole difficulty, and the moment I’m waiting for, is when we install the artworks. Then I’ll know whether it works, where it’s balanced, where it resonates or not, etc…
That’s a lot of unknowns.
I think it’s the reality for any installation, but the more you stick to a repetitive, traditional schema, the more you resort to habit, and for the most part, you’ll start to know what will work and what won’t within a space. But when you’re dealing with a [changing] place and stage direction, the more unknowns you have.
Is that aspect why you opt for a nomadic venue?
No. It’s enormously difficult to change locations and start from scratch all over again. It’s not a tenet of the salon.
What’s next in terms of set-up?
Right now, is an important moment. It can come down to a single detail. As we install the partition walls, I’ll already know if we’ve hit any off notes. With L.A.M Studio we wanted to respect the chapel’s armature and walls, its statues and its presence. So we had to think of a system that’s a little like what you’d imagine from a large 18th or 19th century painter’s studio working in a church, right before his large paintings are hung. What would that look like? In this sense, the slightly floating aspect of these panels, is also narrative.
An installation view of works at Offscreen at Paris’s La Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière.
Courtesy Offscreen
Can you discuss the connections you hope to make between artworks, or a theme to the exhibit?
I don’t work by theme.
How do you work?
Emotion. If I tell myself there’s something there, and I don’t really know what it is, I try to be the least academic as possible or make use of the least number of preconceived notions. And then there’s the question of whether or not the gallery is able to or wants to participate. But galleries are increasingly listening to us, compared to four years ago, when we started.
For me, having several types of images cohabiting a space is already a theme – that’s Offscreen. That said, when faced with an artist who works in series, for instance, it’s possible to feel drawn to one piece or another that we think will work well in the church. It happens through contact with the artwork, and what is accessible.
Annegret Soltau is an example, a 1970’s feminist artist of the avant-garde, who works on the female body, pregnancy, the body’s erasure, and escaping from a kind of confinement, etc… Given the artist is living, and there are significant pieces we can show, yes, I thought it would be good in this space with its history. But there are plenty of other times — and this is where I get a lot of pleasure in doing this — when I discover things. Things that, once placed inside the church, take on another aura.
For instance, we’re installing Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei, a Ukrainian artist duo, near a sculpture of the Virgin and Child. Their video showing Ukrainian children who are sleeping, and who were returned after being kidnapped and sent to Russia, all of a sudden took on another dimension. By installing artworks, you can sometimes find what can…
Wake them.
Yes. The artworks also have their own strengths.
It’s just that the fair business is about creating momentum so people buy. What we’re doing is creating momentum so that people look. That’s what I’m trying to do.
Past visitors know that when they come to Offscreen, they’ll become the recipients of something. It’s a moment that becomes precious, and that is what we should be expecting from an encounter with art — that all of a sudden, something happens.
This does seem counter to conventional fairs.
Yes, but I think they’re wrong. I know we’re called a salon, and we have to use that word. But we’re something different. There are large installations, and institutions or private foundations or large collectors can acquire them, and there are smaller pieces; there’s a way of discovering an artist via an artwork and going towards artworks that are more accessible. There are debuting artists and very well-known artists — there is a full range.
To me, Offscreen’s common thread is my desire to nourish curatorial work that gives perspective to the mechanical reproduction of images, and shows how this traverses art history, beginning in the 20th century, or earlier. I want this to be a subject of discussion, research, and understanding, because our generation and the next generations form their imaginations out of these images. Yet this connecting thread has not been made very visible or obvious in institutions or elsewhere.
Tell us about this edition’s performance.
Performance has existed often in connection with its documentation in the form of an image, an archive of the performance, which itself disappears. With Maria Stamenković Herranz’s durational performance, she is working with director Dustin Lynn, so we’ll do a project around capturing this eight-day performance. This time, Stamenković Herranz had the idea of a spiral of bricks built according to the Fibonacci sequence in the center of the church. For eight days she will build a wall that never closes, which she will destroy on the last day. I find the symbolism of this particularly powerful in this space.
An installation view of works at Offscreen at Paris’s La Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière.
Courtesy Offscreen
What’s your take on the video/photo/film market at the moment? Is it developing?
Yes, of course. But it’s a market in development if we look at artists within the totality of their practice.
There’s a lot of production. Artists are represented by large galleries, and institutions acquire these works. But during this more strained [overall] art market period, we’re also in a moment that is ripe for discovery.
I’m thinking of a small, great work by Urs Lüthi, that is the ZKM collection, called Nature Boy (1973), that is a filmed portrait of him. A hand enters the frame and gently touches his shoulder and face. It’s just sublime. What do I care if its video or not?
What’s important to me is that we don’t say, ‘the artworks are not made to be shown in your living room.’ Large collectors want to promote a certain point of view… I also think a new generation of collectors also want to have art that speaks to today.
Whatever their interests, collectors will find it here. I don’t want people to think, ‘Lets go see the video or photo fair.’ I just want them to come with the idea that they’ll see something different.
If someone says, ‘we saw the drawing fair, now we can go see the video fair,’ it would break my heart.
Offscreen runs from October 21 to October 26 at La Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière in Paris.
