Photography by DAVE BRUEL
Courtesy of KENTON TATCHER
With the turn-of-the 20th century artists across Europe were gathering together in bars and brothels to tear into ideas about pictorial space and the politics of the collective manifesto, as the energies of the individual and the collective were consistently colliding, to set in motion a whole series of movements for the modern world, surreal and super charged. Today, by contrast, we inhabit what might be called the age of the singular and the self: an era in which the artist is so often understood as an autonomous world, a sovereign space dedicated to self. In such a moment, collaboration becomes something more than a practical exchange, it becomes an act of risk. At La Citadelle in Villefranche-sur-Mer the encounter between Arne Quinze and Joana Vasconcelos suggests something more radical still: that the site itself emerges as a third collaborator, perhaps even a third author. Rising above the Mediterranean, with its fortified walls and long histories of defence and enduring memory, the citadel is in no way a neutral container for art, but an active and resistant presence. Here, collaboration unfolds not simply between two distinct artistic sensibilities, but between two artists and a place whose own material and historical force presses back upon them.
It is within this charged space that The Absurd and the Dreamlike, 19 June—31 October 2026, takes shape, less as a harmonious duet than as a field of collision and convergence. Collision, because collaboration at this level necessarily risks friction: between forms, methods, ambitions, and the deep structures of artistic identity. Convergence, because out of that friction something else may emerge, something irreducible to either practice alone. The work is not merely shared; it is tested through contact.
The dreamlike, in this context, is not simply an atmosphere or visual mood. It becomes method. Dream logic permits discontinuity, juxtaposition, displacement, and irrational proximity, precisely the conditions under which collaboration can begin to exceed authorship. As French surrealist André Breton wrote, “the imaginary is what tends to become real.” Here, the dreamlike offers a mode of permission: a way of allowing forms, ideas, and intentions to move beyond the rational ownership of one maker and into a shared zone of transformation. For the artist, surrender is never a simple gesture. Creation is so often bound to authorship, and authorship to ego. As English novelist and art critic John Berger observed, “the relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.” In collaboration, that unsettled condition becomes the work itself. To allow another artist’s language to enter one’s own is to loosen control over meaning, to accept interruption, contradiction, even contamination. One is reminded, too, of American minimal musician John Cage’s remark that “the ego is a narrow room.” Collaboration asks the artist to step beyond that room.
And yet this is perhaps where the contemporary collaboration becomes most compelling: not in the erasure of ego, but in its exposure. Trust, here, is inseparable from risk. To collaborate today, in an age so insistently shaped by the singular voice, the recognisable signature, the cultivated individual, is to risk the dissolution of certainty. It asks what remains of the self when authorship is partially surrendered, and whether the ego can survive without the need to dominate meaning.
Perhaps this is the deeper proposition of the exhibition: not simply the bringing together of two celebrated artists, but the staging of surrender itself. To relinquish authorship, even briefly, is to expose the fault lines between self and other, between intention and accident, between control and emergence. The citadel, with its own weight of history and resistance, becomes not merely a setting but an active interlocutor in this exchange. This conversation begins, then, at the point where trust meets risk: where two practices collide within a site that becomes a collaborator in its own right, and where the dreamlike offers a method through which the individual may, however briefly, yield to something larger, stranger, and shared.
Rajesh Punj: How are you, since I saw you last at your studio?
Arne Quinze: I’m okay, a little overwhelmed. Too many things.
RP: I can imagine. Speaking to your studio manager when I was with you, you really are a ‘force de nature’.
AQ: Thank you. For me, it’s quite exceptional—it feels endless, always going on.
RP: It must be. How do you manage to remember what you’re doing at one moment in relation to one project?
AQ: My son, who is working with me, asks me the exact same question: how do you do that? I have a mind that remembers everything. I know all the projects I’m working on, down to the details, and on top of that I’m already working towards the future, on many other projects, also in my mind.
RP: I imagine perhaps you are one of those people who needs many things happening at once—that pressure.
AQ: Exactly. I have such a busy mind. I am always in the creating process. Even when I’m sleeping, I’m creating; I wake up with solutions, with new creations and concepts. I’m always in that state.
