Camille Kachani, Exile as a Working Engine

Camille Kachani, o exílio como motor da obra collects works produced through the artist’s thirty-year career, accompanied by an essay by curator and critic Paulo Herkenhoff. Blending sculpture, collage and drawing, Kachani's artistic practice investigates the transformation of nature by giving new readings to daily elements, which lose its previously-established functions to become new, singular hybrid artifacts. Huge plush flies or dumpsters, branches growing from books or musical instruments, drawings made out of chewing gum or powdered coffee and milk are part of the universe created by the artist. Kachani’s art, therefore, deconstructs certainty and shakes up conviction, exploring concepts such as identity, belonging, culture and movement.

As described by Herkenhoff, Camille Kachani is part of a select group of contemporary philosopher artists who understand art as a “dense, solid conceptual process”. In the author’s words, “Kachani’s production extended universe involves subjects as varied as the abject and music phenomenology, war and flies, a Babelian dimension of language and Benjamin’s against-the-grain history, fellatio and a piano, misanthropy and a violin, affectivity and grenades, racism and memory, Nietzsche and Lispector, strangeness and vegetation.” These comparisons bring Herkenhoff's reflections to the fields of philosophy, linguistics, psychoanalysis, political sciences and religion, in an attempt to reach the complex Kachanian corpus, filled with meaning, symbols and sense.

About the artist
Camille Kachani was born in Beirut in the 1960s, and arrived in Brazil in 1971, escaping from the warn in Lebanon. He studied photography, painting and sculpture and started working as a nature photographer. Little by little, he migrated to a mixed image procedure, featuring collage and sculpture. His work deals with concepts such as identity and belonging, suggesting, through autobiographical references, that they are created through culture acquisition, in an eternal movement of construction/dissolution. He proposes the thesis that culture and nature are currently indissociable, thus making up the corpus of contemporary humans, an idea that will guide his production in the past few years. Kachani's work is featured in the collections of Brazil’s main museums, as well as others in and outside the country.

About the author
Paulo Herkenhoff was born in 1949, in Cachoeiro de Itapemirim, Espírito Santo. He lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. He's a curator and art critic. Between 1985 and 1990, he was the head curator at the Rio de Janeiro Modern Art Museum (MAM Rio). In 1997, he was responsible for curating the Brazilian pavilion at the 47th Venice Biennale, and, in 1998, he was the curator of the 24th São Paulo Biennale — known as the Anthropophagy Biennale. He was an adjunct-curator at the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) Painting and Sculpture Department from 1999 to 2002, having been one of the few Brazilians to occupy such a role in the institution. The following year, he was the director of the Rio de Janeiro National Fine Arts Museum, and he occupied the role for three years. In 2007, he was part of the curator’s choice committee of Documenta 12. Herkenhoff was the first cultural director of the Rio Arts Museum (MAR), founded in March 2013 at the city’s docks, where he remained until 2016. In 2019 and 2020, he was also the bearer of the Olavo Setubal Professorship of Art, Culture and Science at the Advanced Studies Institute at USP. One of the country's most relevant critic and thinker, he has spoken at various universities and published articles in many journals, catalogues and institutional books, including at Tate Modern (London), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Fundación Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona), and Harvard University and Studio Museum Harlem, in the United States. He was the producer of contemporary artists books, with Cildo Meireles, Maria Leontina, Antonio Dias and Beatriz Milhazes, and the author of important creations with a renovating outlook on art, such as O Brasil e os holandeses 1630-1654; Arte brasileira na coleção Fadel; e Biblioteca Nacional, a história uma coleção. In the past few years, he led the valorization of Black artists participating in large museum collections.

Specifications
Title Camille Kachani, o exílio como motor da obra [Camille Kachani, Exile as a Working Engine]
Author Paulo Herkenhoff
Design Celso Longo
Language Portuguese
Page count 200
ISBN 978-65-5691-103-8
Size 22 x 28 cm
Format Hardcover
Year 2023