Jocelyn Cottencin

For the past twenty years, Jocelyn Cottencin has developed a practice at the intersection of visual and graphic arts, choreography, performance, and film.

His work explores the ways in which images and gestures shape our collective representations and condition our relationship to the world. Approaching modernity as a regime of perception that has produced the idea of a single universal framework, he seeks to shift its boundaries and open up space for plural and situated perspectives, capable of re-engaging a sensitive reading of the present.

His projects — installations, films, performances and publications — set open-ended forms into circulation, with an emphasis on shared experience and collective dimensions. Involving students, residents, and performers, they emerge through dialogue between bodies, territories, and narratives.
Rather than focusing on the production of objects, his work seeks to create spaces for thought, perception, and encounter.

He teaches and leads workshops at various art schools in France and abroad, including ENSBA Paris, ENSBA Dijon, Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, UArts in Philadelphia, ENSA Nantes, and ENSAD Nancy + Artem. He is an associated artist with the Exerce Master’s programme in dance and performance at Agora, Cité Internationale de la Danse in Montpellier.

Jocelyn Cottencin regularly presents his work in France and internationally. In recent years, his projects have been shown at Centre Pompidou in Paris, Grand Café in Saint-Nazaire, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts – Weiwuying in Taiwan, Centre Pompidou Málaga, Mana Contemporary Chicago, Mana Contemporary Jersey City, Kanal – Centre Pompidou in Brussels, UArts in Philadelphia, Frac Bretagne, Carré d’Art in Nîmes, among others.