Saâdane Afif - The Fountain Archives (INDEX) - Exhibitionmfc-michèle didier | Paris - Brussels - PARIS

In 2008, Saâdane Afif began collecting photographic occurrences of Marcel Duchamp's famous Fountain urinal that appeared in various works: magazines, encyclopaedias, art books, popularisation works, leaflets, etc. He has thus constituted a reference library, in which the works collected are listed in chronological order of discovery, without any further classification. The artist then tore out each page reproducing the work, taking care to scan, index and source them precisely.

After this gesture, the support thus stripped of its cause-motive, joined the library of The Fountain Archives. The original pages have been framed and redistributed on the art market, integrating various public and private collections. They have been presented in venues such as: Fundacio Antoni Tapies (Barcelona, 2021), Museo Jumex (Mexico City, 2019), Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (Monaco, 2017), Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2017), West in Huis Huguetan (The Hague, 2017) and the Taipei Biennial (Taipei, 2016)

A quasi-Sisyphian undertaking, as Duchamp's work is fundamental to the history of art, Saâdane Afif wanted to circumscribe his gesture by closing his series at the thousand and first reference. Now that the project has come to an end, a new work has been produced: The Fountain Archives (INDEX). Published by mfc-michèle didier, this publication restores the entirety of the pages taken from the different references of the archive-collection.