Virtual Visit of Bar CodeX by Wen New Atelier
Join us for a guided virtual visit of Bar CodeX, led by curator Marlène Corbun in conversation with Wen New Atelier, the artist duo.
About the Show:
Presented at MAC Bar at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, the exhibition takes as its starting point a space designed for exchange. Here, that dynamic becomes the material of the exhibition itself.
During this visit, Marlène Corbun, the curator, will walk you through the exhibition and its key works, including Roméo & Juliape, a play developed in dialogue with artificial intelligence, as well as interactive pieces such as Pong Poem and Miniscriber. A new body of work, Erasure Bar, extends these explorations, alongside a collaborative piece created with French artist and DJ, Agoria.
Rather than presenting artworks as fixed objects, Bar CodeX approaches art as something that unfolds through use, interaction, and conversation. Language, play, and participation become central elements. The audience is not just a viewer but an active presence within the work.
This session offers a closer look at how artists are rethinking exhibition formats today, moving beyond traditional spaces and drawing from earlier avant-garde gestures to explore new relationships between art and everyday life.
Catalogues:
View the catalogues of the show here.
About Wen New Atelier:
Founded by the duo Kalen Iwamoto and Julien Silvano, treats language as a plastic material and a creative device. At the heart of the duo's practice lies a position of freedom toward language: words are not bound to a single meaning, but unfold across a plurality of senses. Polysemy thus asserts itself as a working principle, revealing the performative and conceptual dimension of text. Wen New Atelier draws from a lineage inherited from the Surrealists' automatic writing, where associations emerge spontaneously, and from the Fluxus spirit, through its playful and participatory relationship to text.
Their works, often interactive, engage the viewer as co- author, generating both ideas and sensory experiences.
Through their practice, the artists also develop a critical reflection on the contemporary regimes of circulation and consumption of textual and visual content, particularly within the social media ecosystem. By replaying, fragmenting, or subverting the mechanisms of meaning-making, they interrogate the attention, speed, and saturation that characterize these digital flows.