All the Images are Emotional

The first image that appeared to the artist following the invitation to curate the twenty-fifth Pernod Ricard Foundation Award was an emoticon inscribed on a New York subway wall. It's a smiley face with a downward smile and spiraling eyes, announcing the end of emotional conflicts with the words: “Emotional conflicts, last day here! To what extent would the study of conflict, and more generally of the emotions at the heart of these tensions, enable us to better understand our changing world? If conflict is not aggression, then how can we untie the knot that forms every time we encounter an affective dissonance or have to face a brutal aggravation of our perpetual state of chronic crisis? These are some of the questions that ran through my mind at the time, and which continue to do so at the start of this new year."