ART FOR HALL
Havas Events Art & Culture

“Imagination is the beginning of creation. We imagine what we desire, we want what we imagine, and finally, we create what we want.”

William Shakespeare

Imagination shines in all of us, and is our innate creative force, universal and shared. It’s an imagination that Art For (H)all celebrates at the heart of Havas. The brainchild of Havas Events’ Art & Culture division, Art For (H)all aims to share and support the best of the French and international art scene. Throughout the year, Havas offers exhibitions, workshops and performances that highlight the values and commitment of our group to culture. Art For (H)all aims to forge links between the worlds of art and business, between artists and employees. This reciprocal approach encourages and supports artistic creation, and also enables artists to explore a new dimension in their work.

Driven by a quasi-scientific logic, Hugo Deverchère’s work proposes a series of experiments to question and evaluate our relationship with the world. He shares a technological repertoire with Grégory Chatonsky, enabling him to develop a critical and reflexive approach, albeit sometimes cynical, but with a message: that of our own extinction. The artificial imagination he creates from data accumulated on the Web becomes a potential monument, by anticipation, whose form could survive our disappearance.

Laura Garcia Karras, encircled by urban environments, spends her time imagining, in the manner of a dystopia, what this nature would look like, but now retranscribed bluish through the prism of screens, undeniably omnipresent in the visual culture that shapes current times. It is this dreamed-of nature, from which she is cut off, that she paints, altered, on her canvases.
Breaking away from this rational framework and embracing an almost mystical approach, Amalia Laurent’s draperies embrace air currents and visitors’ passages, while her dyeing techniques – like a bug in the matrix, between nature and digital aberration – tackle topographical, geographic and cartographic themes. A work that makes tangible the boundaries between the real and invisible worlds, superimposed on our own and nourished by personal and family memories and collective myths.

In 1987, biologist François Jacob argued before the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences that science possesses within itself the art of moving forward blindly: “It hesitates, stumbles, moves backwards, sweats, wakes up with a start. Doubting everything, it seeks itself out, questions itself, and constantly starts over. It’s a kind of workshop of the possible, where what will become the material of science is worked out. No one can ignore the fact that in the processes they propose and confront, artists and their studio-laboratories experience the same sweats, as art history has never ceased to emphasize the experimental nature of art in the contemporary period, and research as a creative process. With a taste for invention, innovation, surprise and even discovery, the arts and sciences have in common the need to question the world by making the invisible visible, and revealing the threads that weave our reality. Through different methodologies and epistemological metaphors, they interact at the heart of a rich and joyful dynamic, the kind that makes for the most beautiful encounters.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become part of our daily lives. Its fields of application are countless, and more and more companies are integrating it into their processes. The general public has also become familiar with AI, thanks to the democratization of text and image generation programs. A new era seems to be opening up for mankind. It’s difficult to gauge the scope of this revolution, which has only just begun. On the one hand, denunciators worry about the numbing of our brains, the jobs threatened, the invasion of our privacy and democratic values. On the other, the exalted advocates of progress, omniscience and economy of means sing the virtues of this new technology. In the midst of this hubbub of opinions, this exhibition invites us to take the time to reflect, to immerse ourselves in a few selected works that take a singular look at AI, its ins and outs. The ten artists and collectives on show have a conceptual use for AI: beyond being a simple tool for creating images using prompts, AI and the questions it raises are the very subject of their works.
If AI answers our questions, the artist questions us.

Just as musical alteration introduces a modification of the note it precedes, or defines the tonality of a piece, artistic perception encourages modulations and transpositions of perception. Exile implies a displacement characterized by a paradoxical state of loss and liberation, between pain and emancipation. For artists who experience exile, moving also means changing their point of view and seeing differently. Their works invite transposition. They question the alterations of the contemporary world, of which individuals and liberties

wars, coups d’état, political repression, discrimination and censorship. Sculptures, videos, photographs and paintings by artists from Burma, Iran, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Russia, Syria and the Ukraine, come together to bear witness to the reasons that drive them to leave their countries, in search of a new life, conducive to personal fulfillment and freedom of expression.

Following the success of the first Edition of the Vivendi Talent Show, which revealed the hidden talents of group employees – the Art For (H)all exhibition will highlight a selection of the competition’s finalist projects. By showcasing their creative and artistic approach in different fields of expression, Vivendi is demonstrating the richness of its vital forces who dare to step out of their comfort zone and create new imaginations. For its 3rd exhibition, Art for (H)all extends the experience of the final at L’Olympia, allowing employees to rediscover the photographs of Romain Roux (Havas Paris) and Christine Besson (Vivendi Village), the digital creations of Julie Ledru (Havas Factory), the drawings of Nicolas Babelon (Gameloft) and the animated characters of Laura Stioui (Prisma Media). Art for (H)all thus continues its support for young artistic creation, and looks forward to discovering the culmination of the project by Thomas Corver (StudioCanal), winner 2023 with his series “Double”.

In 2024, Paris becomes the epicenter of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, and puts sport at the center of attention. For this new exhibition at Havas Village France, Trajectoire Studio presents an extract of its artistic approach: to draw lines between two universes which may seem antagonistic, but which are endowed with the same creative and communicative energy. Blending art and sport to propose original collaborations that build bridges between communities of enthusiasts rarely brought together. The “When Sport Inspires” exhibition brings together artists from different disciplines, highlighting their singular interpretations of sport.
Each artist works on a common ground, drawing inspiration from the game, the athletes, the accessories, the movements… Sport inspires artists, and art invites itself into sporting cultures.