The Day After Tomorrow Various Artists

Speaking chairs, automatically generated film scripts and a naked businessman are amongst the newly commissioned works that top French graduates will be exhibiting at Hiscox Art Projects from 26 April - 30 June 2006.

The five artists are all graduates of the prestigious Ecole Nationale Superièure des Beaux Arts in Paris and have been selected for the exhibition by Hiscox curator Elliot McDonald from their degree show in 2005.

Elliot McDonald, curator, Hiscox Art Projects said:
“The French art scene has steadily grown in dynamism and international profile in recent years through new galleries, public spaces and exciting curators. The talented graduates now emerging from France’s foremost art school reflect this shift and we are delighted to be bringing their work to a wider audience.”

Hiscox Art Projects is a gallery that also functions as a busy City café used by employees and others from outside the office. Several artists have taken inspiration from the business people using the space, playing with ideas of identity and communication.

• Anna Chkolnikova will leave clothes folded up and a suit jacket on the back of a chair in the cafe, suggesting that somewhere in the City is a naked businessman who has left his belongings behind. On the outside of the Hiscox building a sign will count down the days until the weekend.
• Ali Zitouni creates collages using food packaging based on the traditional pattern of the zellij, an Arabic letter. A French Moroccan, Zitouni’s work explores the duality of his upbringing and the double meaning of the French word composer which means to compose and to compromise.
• Cyril Dietrich will create a sound installation at three tables in the Hiscox café. A woman’s voice will read three parts of a text by Villem Flusser discussing the problem of communication between different groups of people. Dietrich will also take a photograph of Hiscox employees in London including one person who is completely unrelated to the company.
• Fabrice Parizy’s work for Hiscox, entitled To Feel Alone comprises a table and chairs with elongated legs making it much higher than the other furniture in the café. Users will be forced to perch uncomfortably above the rest of the diners, isolating them from other people.
• Elise Delattre has worked with Nicolas Richard to develop a computer programme which generates random film scripts from a database of sentences from 50 famous films.

The exhibition opened to the public from 26th April - 30th June 2006 at Hiscox.