DL Review: SYSTEMA / Marseille

Review by Caitlin Merrett King

SYSTEMA
Against Interpretation Club, Benny’s Video, Common Pink, Courtney Jaeger, DOOM SPA, GDL25, Giselle’s Books, JULIET, La Bourgeois, Machine, messieurs-dames, Portland Sunnyside, Prosopopeia, skēnē, Speedy Grandma & Mahasarakhm Mid-Field Artspace, Switchboard, The Racial Imaginary, Tonus, Tseon Tseon, Well Read, Winona

August 28-30 2026
Palais Carli
2 Pl. Auguste et François Carli
13001 Marseille

Installation View, SYSTEMA, 28-30.08.2026, Palais Carli, Marseille. Documentation by Raphaël Massart – Courtesy
of the artists and SYSTEMA © SYSTEMA, 2026

Founded in 2021, SYSTEMA is an annual gathering of international non-profit initiatives, curatorial and artist collectives. It takes the form of an exhibition and live programme at the Palais Carli during the unofficial Marseille Art Week – including the art fair, Art-O-Rama – over the last weekend in August. SYSTEMA.offers a less hectic, anti-fair, non-profit alternative for art audiences and a discursive international consortium for artist-led initiatives. Publicly funded, it benefits from in-kind location and production support from the Pierre Barbizet Regional National Conservatory who occupy Palais Carli. SYSTEMA is comically named after the Russian close combat technique, a play on the relational aspects of martial arts philosophy. Developed in the 1990s as a mixed martial art, central to the practice SYSTEMA fighters learn to relax the mind and body during conflict through breathing control and learning to physically absorb punches.

The gathering is curated by a committee of several key players in Marseille: Won Jin Choi, co-director/founder of independent project space Belsunce Projects and curatorial project Tseon Tseon, and Lucas Jacques-Witz and Ryder Morey-Weale, co-directors of Giselle’s Books, a bookshop and exhibition space across two locations also in the Belsunce neighbourhood. Every year, artist-run projects are selected to contribute to the festival based on extensive year-round research and, significantly, the rule of ‘no friends’ – a potentially impossible restriction within the close circles of even the international artist-run scene. To further avoid any calls of nepotism, this edition of the festival has been randomly selected using suggestions made by previous participants – literally pulled from a hat. Sitting in the beautiful courtyard of the Palais Carli buzzing with artists and visitors international and local, Choi remarks to me how she has an extensive network of ‘SYSTEMA friends’ – artists and curators, previous participants or just visitors, who return year and year to gather together at the Palais. As laid out in the online introduction to the first edition in 2022, SYSTEMA is ‘a tool for encounters and connections’.

So far, each edition has taken place at Palais Carli, the former Institute of Fine Arts, reintegrating the building’s initial intention of sustaining artistic practice. Sadly, the building is gradually falling into structural disrepair and grander areas that were accessible in previous years have now become unusable – like a rickety attic I experienced during my first visit to SYSTEMA in 2023 with joy and jeopardy. For this edition, the exhibition mainly takes place across corridors and modernised classrooms. It is fitting to experience artwork in these sites of transition; the scrappiness exposes the building as an active participant. For example, the itinerant Berlin-based Against Interpretation Club projects two films on the back of two huge filing cabinets – a satisfyingly resourceful gesture – including Nico Kleist’s and Richard Sides’ joyous dance compilation video, MIX 2026 (2026). As Frans Saraste writes in an accompanying text for Sunnyside and Portland’s (Helsinki/Zurich) joint presentation: ‘the building is everything going into and coming out of the process’. Indeed, Portland / Sunnyside present some of the most considered works, like miniature dioramas of group exhibitions housed within MDF walls – a show within a show, a building within a building.

Cabbage leaf ephemera from ‘‘The News’’, an ikebana installation currently on view at Prosopopoeia, Vienna. Documentation by Raphaël Massart – Courtesy of the artists and SYSTEMA © SYSTEMA, 2026

A hierarchical battle between building and artworks occasionally left artworks obscured and difficult to find: down long corridors, up darkened staircases, under a stage. Inconspicuous information display boards along corridors featured mounds of dishevelled cabbage leaves inscribed by Christian Kōun Alborz Oldham aka Flower Planet invited by Prosopopoeia, an exhibition space and bookshop in Vienna, appearing like abandoned study notes shoved inside by reckless students. More conspicuously, hanging clunkily-in-relation beneath one of the Palais’ grand sconces, was Victoria Smith’s oil painting of an illuminated lighthouse, invited by Glasgow-based Machine – a possible allusion to the conflict between curatorial approach and artists.

In a worn-out classroom, London’s artist-run space Le Bourgeois presented a showreel of artist moving image, The Charlatans, 2026 presented atop two upright pianos – Palais Carli is littered with antique Boisselot pianos which are labelled with ‘Please do not touch or use them’. Next to this, on the floor was, Don’t be deceived, 2013, by Adrien Genty, invited by Courtney-Jaeger, Basel. Referencing street magicians, whilst suggesting an equivalence between art making and close-up magic, a tiny, flimsy paper figure dances erratically to a 2001 CD scratch demo. Much like the wider exhibition, the work reveals the trickery of its mechanisms without dispelling intrigue and delight.

Installation View, SYSTEMA, 28-30.08.2026, Palais Carli, Marseille. Documentation by Raphaël Massart – Courtesy
of the artists and SYSTEMA © SYSTEMA, 2026

SYSTEMA is a giant artwork, where the conditions of the crumbling baroque building are becoming too difficult to manage. For visitors, however, I don’t think it’s an issue. As the exhibition notes comment, ‘the exhibition is composed more than once’, curatorially and by the movement of each visitor, who will each have their own labyrinthine experience. I am reminded of writer and curator, previously director of castillo/corrales (Paris), Benjamin Thorel writing of artist-run initiatives as ‘hard to visit’ spaces and how this critically redefines the art world’s sociality. It is because of the inherent structural and economic difficulties faced by artist-run spaces and their caretakers – council regulations, funding issues, other paid employment, care responsibilities, etc., you know the drill – that both disrupt and form their public shape: opening hours, communications, accessibility. However, and paradoxically perhaps, it is through this ‘dynamic, moving, ephemeral, and sometimes flimsy way [that] their work relentlessly keeps a field of possibilities open.’

As I walk around the Palais during the last few hours, I see staff moving furniture back into place: the clean-up has already begun in time for students returning on Monday. I raise the issues of pressurised resources with Jacques-Witz, whether SYSTEMA might happen over a longer period to alleviate post-gathering burnout. It is, he says, an ongoing, complex conversation about capacity for both organisers and participants. Not just a big group show, SYSTEMA offers an alternative model that gives greater visibility to diverse artist-run programmes, creating and fostering networks in a scene often marked by fragmentation and competitiveness. Crucially, it also explores how exhibition-making creates and fosters publics.

To return to Thorel on artist-run spaces: their ‘noisy sociality opens up possibilities that are untold, forgotten, or misunderstood […] they play a critical role in an art world where ways of showing, seeing, and talking are more and more normalised.’ By sharing resources like the borrowed building, attempting a democratic selection process and cultivating an expanding, returning participatory audience, SYSTEMA presents a discursive and collective method of gathering that could be applied across other artist-run scenes internationally. But it is one that should, and will, like its namesake, keep shifting, breathing, rolling with the punches.

Well Read / Kaitlyn Davies & Filipa Aurelio, Last Known Location: A Collaborative Library, 2026. Documentation by Raphaël Massart – Courtesy of the artists and SYSTEMA © SYSTEMA, 2026

Installation View, SYSTEMA, 28-30.08.2026, Palais Carli, Marseille. Documentation by Raphaël Massart – Courtesy
of the artists and SYSTEMA © SYSTEMA, 2026

Victoria Smith, Untitled (Lighthouse), 2026, invited by Machine. Documentation by Raphaël Massart – Courtesy of the artists and SYSTEMA © SYSTEMA, 2026

Installation View, SYSTEMA, 28-30.08.2026, Palais Carli, Marseille. Documentation by Raphaël Massart – Courtesy
of the artists and SYSTEMA © SYSTEMA, 2026

Nico Kleist and Richard Sides, MIX 2026, 2026, invited by Against Interpretation Club. Documentation by Raphaël Massart – Courtesy of the artists and SYSTEMA © SYSTEMA

Installation View, SYSTEMA, 28-30.08.2026, Palais Carli, Marseille. Documentation by Raphaël Massart – Courtesy
of the artists and SYSTEMA © SYSTEMA, 2026

Reading by Théo Robine-Langlois, invited by Tonus. Documentation by Raphaël Massart – Courtesy of the artists and SYSTEMA © SYSTEMA, 2026

The Misfortunes of Virtue by Olga Hohmann, invited by Juliet, SYSTEMA, 29.08.2026, Palais Carli, Marseille. Documentation by Raphaël Massart – Courtesy of the artists and SYSTEMA © SYSTEMA, 2026

Mitterhofer, Theft is Theft, invited by Juliet. Documentation by Raphaël Massart – Courtesy of the artists and SYSTEMA © SYSTEMA, 2026.jpg

Tags: Against Interpretation Club, Benny's Video, Common Pink, Courtney Jaeger, DOOM SPA, France, GDL25, Giselle's Books, JULIET, La Bourgeois, Machine, Marseille, messieurs-dames, Palais Carli, Portland Sunnyside, Prosopopeia, skēnē, Speedy Grandma & Mahasarakhm Mid-Field Artspace, Switchboard, Systema, The Racial Imaginary, TONUS, Tseon Tseon, Well Read, Winona

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