JEAN-BAPTISTE GANNE ::::
born in 1972, Gardanne, France
lives and works in Nice and Amsterdam

Jean-Baptiste Ganne is a photographer and artist who frequently collects and captures images which seemingly have no meaning and places them in the context of the social and economic realities of globalization—to gain new meaning and texture.

The Illustrated Capital is an illustration of Marx’s Capital in 48 photographs, of which 40 are included in World Factory. The photographs illustrate each chapter heading of the book with documentary images taken from everyday life. Ganne’s work evokes both a desire to see if Marx’s analysis of industrial society remains relevant and the discrepancy between past and present, theory and reality. the result foregrounds the awkward relationship between image and text: neither one living up to the expectations of the other. Images and words are put to the test, drained, to see how long they can carry on being meaningful. The text becomes a visual reading of commodity relationships and their effects, questioning the authority and meaning of the photographic medium.

The Cookist originated as a six-day performance in April 2003. Ganne will re-create it for phase 2 of World Factory, “Resistance and dreams,” while he’s in residence at SFAI. For this performance, Ganne cooks a French stew in order to produce a smell. Ganne calls The Cookist an informal seminar on the question of work. This smell is the result of a one-week cooking experience of a very traditional French meal, la daube. Ganne presents, like the meal itself, a cultural imprint for gallery visitors. As a smell cannot be documented, the intervention is ephemeral and only exists in the memory of the “witnesses.” The viewer does not see the artist, and there is nothing to eat, only a smell and an increased appetite. Ganne calls this process a very mediterranean way of doing something by which one starts something and then waits for it to get better and better with time. calling it a “waste of time,” it becomes an interrogation of the notion of work.