In anticipation of the major exhibition Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Unstable Presence, scheduled to run at the Musée from May 24 to September 9, 2018, a conversation between Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Samuel Bianchini and Emanuele Quinz will take place on Wednesday, March 21 at 6:30 p.m. in the galleries devoted to the Musée’s permanent collection. The discussions will revolve around the recent publication of Practicable: From Participation to Interaction in Contemporary Art (MIT Press, 2016), co-edited by Samuel Bianchini and Erik Verhagen, with several contributions from Emanuele Quinz and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.   

Samuel Bianchini is an artist and teacher/researcher at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (EnsAD), Université PSL, Paris, where he heads the Reflective Interaction research group at EnsadLab, the EnsAD laboratory. He also co-directs the Arts and Sciences Chair established in 2017 with the École polytechnique and the Fondation Daniel et Nina Carasso. Tying in closely with his research and his artistic practice is his theoretical work, which he publishes frequently. Titles include Practicable. From Participation to Interaction in Contemporary Art (MIT Press, 2016), co-edited with Erik Verhagen, Behavioral Objects 1 – A Case Study: Céleste Boursier Mougenot (Sternberg Press, 2016), co-edited with Emanuele Quinz, and À Distances – Œuvrer dans les espaces publics (Les Presses du réel, 2017), with Mari Linnman.

Art historian and exhibition curator, with a PhD in aesthetics, science and arts technology, Emanuele Quinz is a senior lecturer at Université Paris 8. Since 2012, he has been a teacher/research associate at EnsadLab, École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, as part of the Reflective Interaction research program, where he is co-director of the doctoral seminar. His research explores the convergences between disciplines in contemporary artistic practices: from visual arts to music, from dance to design. He is the author of Le cercle invisible. Environnements, systèmes, dispositifs (Les presses du réel, 2017) and has edited or co-edited a number of publications, including Strange Design (with Jehane Dautrey, it: éditions, 2014), Esthétique des systèmes (Les presses du réel, 2015), Behavioral Objects 1 (with Samuel Bianchini, Sternberg Press, 2016) and Uchronia (with Franck Apertet and Annie Vigier, Sternberg Press, 2017).

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer was born in Mexico in 1967. He was the first artist to represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale, with an exhibition at Palazzo Van Axel in 2007. He has also shown at biennials and triennials in Cuenca, Havana, Istanbul, Kochi, Liverpool, Melbourne (National Gallery of Victoria), Montreal, Moscow, New Orleans, New York (International Center of Photography), Seoul, Seville, Shanghai, Singapore and Sydney. Lozano-Hemmer’s artistic production has been the subject of monographs and performances in numerous institutions, including MUAC in Mexico City (2015), SFMOMA (2012), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney (2011), the Manchester Art Gallery (2010), the Guggenheim Museum (2009) and the Barbican Centre in London (2008). Collections holding his work include the MoMA (New York), Tate (London), MAC (Montreal), SFMOMA (San Francisco), MONA (Hobart), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), Borusan Contemporary (Istanbul), ZKM (Karlsruhe) and MUAC (Mexico City). He is represented by bitforms gallery (New York), Art Bärtschi & Cie (Geneva) and Max Estrella (Madrid).