30 CANDLES FOR THE 19, CRAC!

In 2025, le 19, Regional center for contemporary art of Montbéliard, celebrates thirty years of exhibitions in the former “hangar” at 19, avenue des alliés in Montbéliard.
On this occasion, the 19 team would like to celebrate with the public three decades of exhibitions, artistic projects, residencies, meetings, workshops, discoveries and collective creations.

From the outset, the 19, Crac has been a local tool that designs its programming and brings it to life with and for the people who live there. It’s a place for sharing, and the story of its experiences must be passed on so that we can collectively build its future.

For this anniversary, in 2025, the art center’s team is organizing hospitality and convivial moments, relying in particular on the continuation or reactivation of partnerships undertaken by the art center throughout its history. It will also create new ones to expand its network of affects, alliances and experiments.

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AN EXHIBITION
Dans la tête du 19, Crac [In the mind of 19, Crac!]

Collective exhibition of heterogeneous objects linked to the history of the 19 and with works by Hans Bellmer, Atila Biro, Robert Combas, Dado, Salvador Dali, Jörg Immendorff, Hiroko Okamoto, Odile Liger, Jean Messagier, Clovis Prévost, Bernard Rancillac, Djamel Tatah, Roland Topor, Bram Van Velde, Florent Wong.

Exhibition curators: the 19, Crac team, based on the ASCAP art library collection.

Every summer since 2023, the art center’s mezzanine has hosted artistic projects linked to remarkable local initiatives. After the exhibition of Jean-Jacques Mathieu’s archives from the Résidences adventure playground in Belfort in 2023, and the Open Mezzanines in 2024, which featured Fabien Guillermont and Thomas Vinck’s Botanique Sabari with the Grange la Dame educational center in Montbéliard, this anniversary year sees the history of 19, Crac in the spotlight.

Based on a collective exploration of the art center’s archives, the current 19 team presents an emotional and evocative retrospective of 30 years of creation at 19, avenue des alliés in Montbéliard.

Posters, flyers, books, printed matter of all kinds, as well as photos and videos, have all been brought together in the course of discoveries and research, to affirm the importance of visual archives as documentary capital in the history of the art center.

However, archives have not always played a central role in the work habits of contemporary art venues. Busy as they are with reporting on the present, the importance of “patrimonializing” them is still quite recent. So, like any memory, the archives of Le 19 are fragmentary, with gaps and holes, which the team is also attempting to question as evidence of the contexts and episodes traversed by the art center over the course of its history.

The proposal is made up of sensitive choices and hypotheses. It takes advantage of sometimes vacant spaces to propose other narratives, welcoming outside words and presenting them in a non-chronological and creative way. This is how, for example, the team chose to combine documents specific to the history of the 19, Crac association with a selection of works from the ASCAP art library collection, which was housed at the art center in its early days.

Welcome to the mind of the Crac, and this attempt to paint a portrait of it through its moods, rumors and multiple lives!