Behzad Dehno / This Way, Paris

05.04 – 06.01.2024

Beau Travail
Skånegatan 108
116 35 Stockholm

Photography by Thea Giglio

This Way, Paris

According to the standard view, the world of contemporary art is one of peaceful
internationalism, a world of free and equal access in which recognition is available
to all participants. It is an enchanted world that exists outside time and space and
so escapes the mundane conflicts of history. Such a view was fabricated in nations
where the belief in a pure definition of art is the strongest: art removed from history,
from the world of nations, political and military competition, economic dependence,
linguistic domination—the idea of a universal art that is non-national, non-partisan,
and unmarked by political or linguistic divisions.
However, nothing is more international than a national state: it is constructed solely
in relation to other states, and often in opposition to them. National rivalries arise
from the fact that their political, economic, military, diplomatic and geographic his-
tories are not different, as one might presume, but rather unequal. Competition de-
fines and unifies the world system while monopolists set limits between metropole
and periphery. So, while not every artist proceeds in the same way, all attempt to
enter the same contest and, despite unequal advantages, all endeavor to attain the
same goal: legitimacy. The globalization of contemporary art depends on the entry
of new contestants intent upon adding to their stock of artistic capital: each new
player, in bringing to bear the weight of their national heritage helps to unify the
spaces of contemporary art and extend the domain of cultural rivalry.
How might one map this world? The artistic and intellectual map cannot be super-
imposed upon the political map, neither are reducible to political history. Nonethe-
less, art remains relatively dependent on politics, especially in countries without
artistic resources. On the one hand, one sees the world with its profusion of facts,
political, social, economic, ideological; and, on the other, the artwork, a phenome-
non that is apparently solitary, always ambiguous for the fact that it can carry more
than one meaning at a time. These two geographies seldom coincide.
At one point in recent history, one might have located Paris as the world capital
of art. To Gertrude stein, “Paris was where the twentieth century was” and Walter
Benjamin claimed it as the capital of the nineteenth century. Beginning in 1789, Paris
became a capital for a world republic that had neither borders nor boundaries, a
universal homeland exempt from all profession of patriotism, a kingdom of art set
up in opposition to the ordinary laws of states, a transnational realm whose sole
imperatives are those of art and literature: the universal republic of culture. Victor
Hugo writes in the 1867
Paris Guide
:
Without 1789, the supremacy of Paris is an enigma: Rome has more majesty, Trier is
older, Venice is more beautiful, Naples more graceful, London wealthier. What then
does Paris have? The revolution of all the cities of the earth, Paris is the place where
the flapping of the immense invisible sails of progress can best be heard.

Paris combined two sets of apparently antithetical properties, bringing together the
historical concepts of freedom. On the one hand, it symbolized the revolution, the
overthrow of the monarchy, the invention of the rights of man. On the other hand, it
was the capital of letters, the arts, luxurious living, and fashion. Paris was at once the
intellectual capital of the world, the arbiter of good taste, and the source of political
democracy: an idealized city where artistic freedom could be proclaimed and lived;
a destination, as Octavio Paz once expressed, that could be remembered in advance
of one’s arrival.
One could additionally, like Valéry, describe Paris as the imperial bourse of aesthetic
judgement. Or, per Bourdieu, describe its symbolic politics as “an imperialism of the
universal” for having used denationalization for national purposes. Paris’ incessantly
proclaimed universality produced two types of consequences: one imaginary, which
helped construct and consolidate a Parisian mythology; the other real, associated
with the inflow of foreign artists, political refugees, and isolated artists who came to
get their start in Paris—and its impossible to say which were the consequence of the
other. This twin phenomena increased and multiplied, each helping to establish and
support the other. Paris was doubly universal, by virtue of both the belief in its univer-
sality and of the real effects that this belief produced. An ideal Parisian would be one
whose horizon extends far beyond their city and who is not content to be from Paris.
This is so that nothing may be foreign to Paris, so that Paris may always be in contact
with everywhere in the world, that it may become a capital beyond all local politics.
It was through this very process of emancipation from national politics that Paris
became the world capital of art in the nineteenth and twentieth century. It was able
to manufacture a universal art while consecrating works produced in outlying terri-
tories, impressing the stamp of culture upon works that came from far flung lands;
thereby denationalizing and departicularizing them, declaring them to be acceptable
as legal tender in all the countries under its cultural jurisdiction. Yet this power to
universalize hazarded a unilateral structure of judgement that interpreted periph-
eral context as anachronism, evidence of a blindness peculiar to metropoles that
assumes the burden of a tax on artists from the antipodes.
It would be hard to argue that the Paris that has been described so far is recogniz-
able in the present. The image of a cultural flatland littered with cheap souvenirs
and unmerited snobbery is hard to square with a once-revolutionary imaginary. Was
it the fallout of 1968? The repudiation of 1789 by the collapse of Soviet Union and
the decline of movements for national liberation? Or perhaps the Fifth Republic’s
provincialization by an American-lead international order which transformed con-
temporary Paris into something like a third-century Athens when it was dominated
by Imperial Rome, minus the benefit of imperial citizenship.

It is with the living memory of this world capital that the present exhibition assumes
its form. A series of painted arrows mounted to the gallery’s walls each orient its au-
dience’s attention in the direction of this world historical city—what if la promesse
de bonheur bore a dedicated a sign post? This is accompanied by an unedited ar-
chive of state-mandated broadcasted interviews with American lottery winners, a
literal community of fate.
By drawing a map of the contemporary world and highlighting the gap between
great and small nations, one may hope to be delivered from the prejudices incul-
cated by the center. The dream would be to reverse continental drift; that, distant
though they are from each other on the map, the world and the artwork can none-
theless be brought together, be interlocked with each other. One might imagine a
world to compliment the following remark by Brancusi to Tzara: In art, there are no
foreigners.

– Sam Pulitzer

Behzad Dehno (DK, TR, IR) b. 1993 Aarhus, is a transnational artist, cur-
rently based between Geneva, Switzerland, and Stockholm, Sweden.
Behzad explores the imaginary in his artistic practice. He works with
art based on an interest in perceptions of reality and time – both their
boundaries and moments of blur. His works consist of fragments that
form a playful encounter with pre-existing systems, often situation-
specific, and where the viewer becomes a participant.

Links:
Behzad Dehno
Beau Travail