The Paris-based dealer Kamel Mennour, who was caught up in the city’s terrorist attacks on 13 November, says that it is important to make a stand and “fight terror with art, not weapons”. Mennour was in the Stade de France with his son when suicide bombers attempted to sabotage the football match between France and Germany. “Art can boost our consciousness and humanity; we must act as one in our response to the atrocities. We have lost our innocence,” he said yesterday at the fair.
A work on show by the Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping at Mennour’s stand (M11), The Pole of the East (2004), is a political statement. The aluminum signpost directs pedestrians to 17 countries including Russia, Germany and Libya, as well as nations labelled by the former US president George W. Bush in 2002 as the “axis of evil”: Iraq, Iran and North Korea. “I wanted to bring this work because it shows how artists can anticipate world events, even war, and reflect the sensitive situation worldwide,” Mennour says.
Huang’s piece was first shown at the Liverpool Biennial in the UK in 2004; the artist will fill the Grand Palais next spring with a vast immersive installation for the seventh edition of Monumenta.