A new venue for contemporary art will open in a converted factory in Maubourguet, west of Toulouse, in Southern France on 13 June. The Foundry is a former metalwork and armaments manufacturing plant that will have around 2500 sq. m of space for art.
Run by the London-based foundation A/political, the Foundry will be used to display works from the organisation’s collection as well as for temporary shows. Some permanent rooms will be allocated to artists who the foundation works with. The inaugural exhibition, The Copenhagen Declaration, comprises work by Santiago Sierra and Jens Haaning, and travels from the Faurschou Foundation in Denmark. Viewing will be by appointment.
A/political was founded by the Russian-born venture capitalist Andrei Tretyakov, of Bluewire Capital in London. The foundation concentrates specifically on socio-political art, collecting historical work and supporting the development of living artists. The collection includes pieces by Abdulnasser Gharem, Ai Weiwei, Rodchenko, Andres Serrano and Alfredo Jaar, among many others. It is not currently open to the public.
Tretyakov was previously a partner in the Russian commercial gallery Orel Art with Illona Orel, the gallery behind the Chapman Brothers’ pseudonymous outing as the Shamanov Brothers in 2009. He bought out Orel and created Art Sensus that in turn became A/political, a non-commercial foundation.
“True entrepreneurship is a form of art,” Tretyakov says on the Bluewire website. So does he see any contradiction in what many would see as a definitive capitalist enterprise supporting a collection that is largely composed of art produced from a left-wing critical perspective?
“I don’t find this very strange,” he says. “We’re definitely not left or right. In the past few years the art was going left because in 2008 [there was] this major international crisis, which started in the US but influenced and affected the entire world. [But] if you look at our artists, they’re not activists. What’s important for us is to work with artists who understand the complexities of existing systems and are really asking questions…[the Russian conceptual artist] Andrei Molodkin, for example, with his Falling Capitalism sculpture…[artists] sense things which are happening on the outskirts of society.”
The Foundry space was discovered by Molodkin, a long-standing A/political collaborator, who uses a nearby fabrication facility and is currently working on a large-scale version of Falling Capitalism, due to go on display at Bocconi University in Milan before the end of the Milan Expo in October.
Tretyakov says this is only the start of A/political’s activity. “The last two years have been extremely fast in what we have been doing. We’ve been working with a lot of museums, but we are also discussing whether we want to build our own private museum. We are in a very early stage of our journey.”
The Copenhagen Declaration, by Jens Haaning and Santiago Sierra, is at The Foundry, Maubourguet, 13 June-1 October. www.thefoundry.fr www.a-political.org