Personnages à réactiver A series of performances by Pierre Joseph

In the frame of the last week end of the exhibition Poïpoï, Une Collection Privée à Monaco and outside of artmonte-carlo, the NMNM presents a series of performances by Pierre Joseph, the personnages à réactiver (characters to be reactivated).

A character to be reactivated is played in two stages: the character is primarily present in the flesh during the opening of the exhibition for which he has been imagined.
The actor plays a minimal role in a loop. He doesn’t speak. Subsequently he is replaced by a photograph and therefore becomes a character «to be reactivated». The purchaser of the photograph (and consequently the character) may thus renew this performance as he finds fit although constrained to respect certain rules.
The characters “to be reactivated”, a sort of character-type, are played out during the exhibitions by actors who endorse a plethora of characters and following indications stipulated by the artist enable them to incarnate these characters.
They interpret, for example, the role of a witch crushed against a wall, of Snow white sleeping on a bed, of a warrior on horseback, of an injured motorcyclist or even an American policeman in uniform distributing leaflets which point out that the fictive characters are on strike because of an excess of bad scenarios.
For the sequel to the exhibition each living sculpture is replaced by a photographic print. This image functions as a representation and at the same time as a tool since it serves as a certificate of sale and also as the instructions for a future reactivation.
The two elements of the work maintain an ambiguous “loop” relationship, each one being the representation and the documentation of each other.