Presentation of the artist and his work:
 His intervention at the Venice Biennale in 2005 has been a great success and Muntadas, the Catalan artist, is now really famous on the international artistic scene. He first studies architecture and engineering in Barcelona. Then, he decides to focus on video in 1971 and moves to the United States of America. The devices he uses are decisively contemporary: photography, installation, sound, Internet, multimedia installations and his work is quite critical. It deals with social or political issues. It tends to unveil the hidden purposes or ambiguous strategies that lay behind commercials and TV images. From 1988 onwards, a series of installations questions the characteristics of media: their tics, their postures, their rites. The artist dissects the real or presumed purposes of an economical or temporal spiritual authority. His very contemporary formal proposals enlighten the real messages we usually miss. He thus denounces the linguistic codes of communication tools and strategies. In the 90’s, he works on public/private space with the projection of images and mottos. The house, the idea of « home », the street, the stadiums, the city/museum are the matter of a new work, but still related to an urban center or an exhibition area. At the end of the 90’s, with « On translation », Muntadas translates a sentence 23 times in a row with web translators. What will this sentence become as it never recovers its original meaning? His recent researches involve both architecture as a symbol and the notion of Mass Media. The viewer is invited to enter a world of statistics as well as to experiment his human ability to wonder. 

The project:
 Muntadas is the first artist ever to work on the theme of the « knife » here at the Creux de l’enfer. To him the knife is in the meantime a « survival object », an anthropological sign (a weapon to kill or to protect oneself)- or the mythical power of knife in the movies or at the circus- and also the ordinary, aesthetic and common artefact (kitchen knife, design knife, pocket knife)... Muntadas came to Thiers in spring 2005 for a first study on his project (he visited the Cutlery Museum of Thiers and later the Cutlery Museum of Albacete in Spain). The exhibition will combine various art forms on both levels of the building: installation, performance, video, photography and silkscreen. It will join the content of the subject « knife » and the artist’s personal permanent inquiries into the linguistic forms of body movements. The peculiar context of cutlery will allow the exploration of the meaning of the subject and of the exception of the tool in modern times. 

Frédéric Bouglé, September 2006
trad: X Fayet