Glassbox
GLASSBOX is a non-profit association that aims to promote emerging contemporary creation in the arts. Run by artists who manage the space at 4, rue Moret, Paris, it provides young creators with access to a form of visibility specific to each approach and works to propose hybrid formats for the production and promotion of contemporary art.
- Team
Committed to making visible emerging creation, GLASSBOX team is itself composed of young artists. It has constantly changed throughout its 23 years of activity, both in order to remain as close as possible to the networks of young art school graduates, but also to enable its members, once they have become more experienced, to devote themselves fully to their personal endeavours.
The starting office had names that became later landmark, such as Yann Kopp or Stéphane Doré. Elfie Turpin, Nicolas Tilly, Nicolas Julliard, Oriol Nogues, the 1.0.3. collective, Sabrina Issa, Stéphane Despax, Emilie Schalck, among others also joined the association.
The team is now composed of Clémence Agnez, Margaux Estivill, Marion Lisch, Benjamin Fraboulet, Ugo Decorse-Ballara, Nicolas Weber, François Briand and Louise Masson, accompanied by guests and collaborators. (2023)
- Agenda
GLASSBOX builds its activity around a programme, in order to allow the realisation of specific production formats rather than to expose a certain number of objects. In order to offer artists, the team and the audience, the experience of seeing, at the same time and in the same space, the works being made and being present, the GLASSBOX team seeks to exhaust the forms that a project can adopt as part of its exhibition.
From this emerge several directions, with heterogeneous temporalities, as so many proposals to question the relationship between project and result. In the idea of showing the progress of a process, the central issue is the conversion of the event into an implementation, i.e. into an object that escapes the passage of time. How to convert a temporal content into a stable support, a moment into an object ?
With an emphasis on production, on making, the GLASSBOX creative process is above all concerned with the specific modalities of the creative process. The space of rue Moret, is above all a mediation between the artist and his work by imposing constraints, directions or questions; it is more a device already present and with which one must work rather than a neutral welcoming structure.
Thus, GLASSBOX puts its own skills to work for a project it has selected and determined by imposing constraints, a protocol or choices in a benevolent and critical dialogue with the artist. Also, the production of the work matters as much as the final rendering: it is the process of creation, the making itself that is at the heart of the issues that GLASSBOX is seeking to define. (2023)
- History
GLASSBOX was in 1997 by a dozen young graduates of the Beaux-Arts de Paris who decided to join forces to build their own exhibition context together. Based for ten years on Oberkampf Street in the eleventh arrondissement, the association takes its name from the exhibition space it occupied there, a kind of glass cube on the mezzanine floor of a residential complex
In 2007, the office left the 11th to settle for three years at the Cité Universitaire Internationale where it developed its curatorial activities both on campus and with other partner structures.
From late 2010 to early 2012, continuing its sole activities, GLASSBOX left the Cité Internationale in search of a new independent exhibition space that it will find at the end of 2011. Back in the Oberkampf District and after several months of renovation work under the direction of the FreaksFreeArchitects, it reopened in March 2012 at 4 rue Moret. Since then, the space has hosted various exhibition formats, listening cycles, culinary performances and production residencies.
Since 2018, GLASSBOX has been committed to new perspectives and since January 2019 it has been part of Montpellier’s cultural dynamism to experiment the possibilities of friction between the two artistic landscapes. GLASSBOX-SUD is investing for two months in a 230 m2 space within La halle Tropisme, in order to develop an independent exhibition, in connection with local structures and initiatives. In June 2019, Glassbox invited Marine Peixoto to show her new work at 9, rue des Balances, in the context of ‘100 artists in the city’ (2023)
- Publications
- Glassbox, ed. Clémence Agnez, Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2019. Texts by Clémence Agnez, Saâdane Afif, Jean-Christophe Arcos, Dominique Blais, Nicolas Bourriaud, Collectif 1.0.3, Lucille de Witte, Élie During, Flora Katz, Sarah Ihler-Meyer, Irma Name (Hélène Deléan et Clément Caignart), Sabrina Issa, Patrice Joly, Sophie Lapalu, Ingrid Luquet-Gad, Éric Mangion, Olivier Marboeuf, Pedro Morais, Stefan Nikolaev, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Joël Riff. [1] (French)
- Links
