The Meet-up is an annual programme of studio visits organised by the Réseau documents d’artistes across France, designed to encourage the discovery of regional art scenes and raise the international profile of artists. Over four days, participants will move between studios and exhibition spaces, meeting the artists and professionals who bring the Rennes art scene to life across generations and media.

This session in Rennes, from 9 to 12 October 2026, is organised by the Réseau documents d’artistes, Documents d’artistes Bretagne and AICA International as part of the 58th Congress of the International Association of Art Critics, taking place in Rennes from 12 to 16 October 2026.

Documents d'artistes Bretagne
ddabretagne.org

Since 2009, Documents d'artistes Bretagne (DDA Bretagne) has been publishing monographic dossiers in collaboration with artists from Brittany. Fully accessible online, these dossiers help to promote their artistic practices and offer an insight into a dynamic regional art scene. Committed to supporting the artists in its archive, DDA Bretagne accompanies them throughout their careers and mobilises networks of professionals around their practices and projects.

Documents d'artistes Bretagne is a member of the Réseau documents d'artistes, a federation of Documents d'artistes associations in Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, Centre-Val de Loire, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Réunion, Occitanie, Geneva, the Caribbean and the Amazon.

Le Réseau documents d'artistes
reseau-dda.org

Founded in 2011, the Réseau documents d'artistes brings together and coordinates local Documents d'artistes associations. Supported by the Ministry of Culture, it is a leading organisation dedicated to supporting professional artistic practices and promoting them to a wide audience. It works to enhance the national and international visibility of the artists it supports, whilst developing shared initiatives within the network. Its editorial platform, reseau-dda.org, provides access to monographic dossiers on several hundred visual artists produced by the Documents d'artistes, and offers, through the dissemination of original content (critical texts, residency journals, filmed portraits, etc.), a space for discovering contemporary art in France and the Canton of Geneva.

6.00 pm–8.00 pm: Welcome and time for guests to get to know one another + brief presentation on DDA and emerging trends (professional practices, BASE and Les Chantiers)

8.00 pm: dinner at Crêperie du Thabor (25 Rue Saint-Melaine, 35000 Rennes)

8.45 am–9.15 am : Welcome and introduction to Documents d'artistes and Reseau documents d'artistes

10.00 am-12.00 pm: studio visits (artists listed below)

Born in 1973
julie@juliecfortier.net

Since my early days in video and performance, my work has been recording the passage of time by highlighting processes involving erasing and emptying. The research which I undertake in reality has to do with the experience of loss (loss of time, loss of energy, unproductiveness, loops, erasure, etc.), and incomplete spaces in which this can show itself (white screen, empty space, loss of memory). I explore different ways of constructing images using simple forms, through performance, video, photography, sculpture and installation. Since 2012 I have added experimental research with smells and aromas to my repertory. Their mnesic and affective power modifies the ways of implementing memory in the representations and narratives which I compose. The evanescent and allusive character of smells which is linked with the work of loss and erasure which I have managed to conduct in my performances and also with the tenuous events which I film. By being obliged to breathe, the spectator is obliged to smell. This paradoxical aspect of an absence which is nevertheless present, and invisible but intimately penetrating, captivates me. What interests me is reconfiguring the perception that we may have of a given space and creating upheavals of perception in its representation, a break between the present experience and its past representation. For me, smells are the ideal material for further pursuing my work on the construction of images in relation with a memory and its narration.

Born in 1974
contact@rearsound.net

Centered on books, the library, and the archive, and most often inspired by chance discoveries, Yann Sérandour's work has, from its inception, explored the phenomena of translation and reproduction at play in historical transmission, attentive to what shifts or is lost across periods, territories, and communities. Drawing on artifacts borrowed from predecessors, as well as accidents and chance occurrences, he conducts investigations, indexes gaps, unsettles certainties, and extends narratives that often follow winding paths. From books to exhibitions and back again, his work initially engaged the "heroic" conceptual art of the late 1960s and 1970s, a largely North American and Western European canon, working from its margins. That period particularly speaks to him for having been widely disseminated in the form of publications and printed materials, his medium of choice. In his later work, he has been able to freely shift his focus to other fields and more distant eras, exploring subjects as varied as the trade in antique mirrors, the domestic cultivation of cacti, the standardization of dog breeds, and the musical revival of the harpsichord, whose histories he reinterprets and freely interconnects. Since the early 2020s, prompted by invitations and commissions, his work has turned to the contexts in which artworks are produced and circulate: systems of funding and collecting, networks of energy and of affect, archives, and the writing of history. Represented by the Parisian gallery gb agency until its closure in late 2023, his work has been exhibited since the mid-2000s in a variety of art centers, museums, and galleries in France and abroad. His work also takes the form of artist's books, multiples, and collective publications, held in collections including the Bibliothèque Kandinsky at the Centre Pompidou and the Frac Bretagne. His catalog Inside The White Cube: Palimpsest Edition (JRP|Ringier, 2009) was honored as one of the Most Beautiful Swiss Books of 2009. He has edited collective volumes, including Une traduction d'une langue en une autre (Presses du réel, 2014, with Sébastien Pluot) and En parlant, en écoutant (Shelter Press / La Criée, 2018), and more recently published Délire et rêves dans La Gradiva de Hains (Frac Bretagne, 2020), nominated for the 2023 Bob Calle Prize. He holds a Ph.D. in visual arts (2006) and is a maître de conférences at Rennes 2 University.

12.00–1.30 pm: Lunch at Alphonse

2.00–2.45 pm: Exhibition visit at 40mcube art center (48 Av. Sergent Maginot, 35000 Rennes)

2.45–3.45 pm: studio visit (artist listed below)

Born in 1992
Fanny_gicquel@outlook.fr

A graduate of the École Européenne Supérieure d'Art de Bretagne (2018) and trained in art therapy at the University of Poitiers, Fanny Gicquel has spent several years developing a practice that questions how objects can support forms of presence and relation. Her sculptures occupy a singular space; they are worn, handled, passed on. Conceived as relational tools that foster dynamics of care, attention, and vulnerability, these forms create the conditions for an encounter, an exchange, or a sharing. This attention to lived experience also runs through the artist's collective and therapeutic projects. The workshops and participatory projects she develops with diverse audiences, including people with disabilities, extend the concerns present in her work, between co-creation and transmission.

4.00 pm–4.30 pm: Exhibition visit at the Museum of Fine Arts (20 Quai Emile Zola, 35000 Rennes)

4.30 pm–5.45 pm: AICA Académie meeting Caroline Cieslik, Lise Dua, Ines Dobelle, Morgan Larbi and Mérovée Dubois

6.30 pm–9.30 pm: Drinks and dinner (location to be confirmed)

9.50 am-01.00 pm: studio visits (artists listed below)

Born in 1987
montagne.q@gmail.com

My practice is built on quotation and transposition. I sift through the fields of art history, architecture and mass culture to find elements pertaining to Wonder – wonder in the sense of anything that may help an individual escape their immediate reality, including religion, cinema or utopias. Once these elements are taken out of context, they acquire new levels of interpretation. When abstracted, they become polysemous and hermetic. These pieces all lie at the intersection of several ideas, several references, and require a certain degree of deciphering on the viewer’s part. Various interventions, some of which relate to the ways the pieces are displayed or hung, make the interpretation more straightforward. Documents often play an important part in this process, as if they were leaving a string of clues. While I mostly use painting and drawing, I don’t favour any specific medium other than the exhibition itself, which serves as an implementation of the many possible ways in which the works can be structured. After focusing on underwater themes for several years, my research has now led me to become interested in depictions of nature and, to a greater extent, to question humankind’s relationship with the natural world.

Born in 1992
ali.alissonschmitt@gmail.com

My artistic practice is driven by narratives and their movements, whatever form they may take. Through installation, video and performance, I seek to draw connections between various stories: stories that resonate within me, collective stories, but above all those of the bodies that accompany them. I was born in Montpellier, in the south of France; I studied in Sète, Rennes and Shanghai, and I live in Rennes. I have worked in the desert, in the Nièvre region, and in my bed. I have walked a great deal for my work, as I carry these narratives with me, transforming them into a sculpture or even an encounter. A large part of my practice is video-based. Although digital, I take a very hands-on approach to it, particularly in the editing process, which I treat as a form of collage. I like to set these narratives within immersive spaces—sometimes functional ones—in which viewers can linger. My installation practice initially arose from the need to provide my videos with a contextual environment conducive to viewing. Over time, it has moved beyond its original function to become autonomous and/or complementary to the films. The forms take on a life of their own; they no longer embody the various elements of a single narrative, but rather the different ways of telling it.

1.00–2.00 pm: Lunch at the Vivarium

2.00–2.20 pm: Presentation of the Vivarium

02.30 pm-05.50 pm: studio visits (artists listed below)

Born in 1993
klr.guetta@gmail.com

Claire Guetta is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Rennes. Graduated from the Rennes campus of École des beaux-arts de Bretagne in 2017, she has developed a practice that blends performance, video and photography. Immersed in popular culture since childhood, she creates characters whom she portrays in narratives where her personal life is transformed into a romantic – and at times dramatic – epic.
Through these characters and staged scenes, her work explores concepts such as work, precariousness, identity, gender, sexuality and grief. Inspired by genre cinema and B-movies, Claire Guetta champions an aesthetic of amateurism which she perceives as deeply poetic: something ‘poorly made but sincere’, imbued with energy and generosity. So much the better if the set is made of cardboard, as long as the story is told with verve and panache.
Since 2020, she has been performing as a drag artist under the name KLR Voyance as part of the Orfélin·e·s collective. For her, these performative, activist and community-based practices are inseparable from her visual art.

Born in 1991
manon.riet@gmail.com

Manon Riet has been a member of the Vivarium – a shared artists’ studio – since 2017 and co-founded La Plage Production in early 2020 with Morgan Azaroff, Claire Guetta and Thomas Portier. Since 2017, she has regularly collaborated with Thomas Portier. Manon Riet graduated in 2016 with a DNSEP in Graphic Design from the EESAB in Rennes. Her videos have been screened at various festivals, such as Les Inattendus in Lyon and Les Instants Vidéos in Marseille. Most recently, her work has been exhibited at the Phakt cultural centre in Colombier, Rennes, and at Askip in Nantes. Her work has been included in public collections since 2023. Her video Après l’heure bleue forms part of the City of Rennes’ Municipal Contemporary Art Collection, and her video installation Les Vagabondes forms part of the Ille-et-Vilaine Departmental Contemporary Art Collection. Since 2018, she has regularly taken part in creative and outreach residencies with Thomas Portier. Most recently, they have worked at l’aparté – a contemporary art space – and at La Crypte d’Orsay. In 2023, they co-directed the short film Le labyrinthe du betta, a portrait of a woman passionate about aquariums who is undergoing a transformation.

Born in 1989
portier.thomas@gmail.com

Having graduated in 2016 from the EESAB – Rennes campus, Thomas Portier has been a member of the Vivarium – Atelier Artistique Mutualisé since 2017 and regularly collaborates with Manon Riet. Thomas Portier’s work has been shown in various exhibitions, such as at Phakt as part of the exhibition Sous le gazon viennent les décombres in 2026 and at the Crypte d’Orsay as part of a creative residency carried out in collaboration with Manon Riet. His work was recently acquired by the City of Rennes as part of the Municipal Contemporary Art Fund, and he received an individual creation grant from the DRAC Bretagne for his project Le gazon le plus vert in 2025.

Born in 1989 in Florida, USA
hgalbreaith@gmail.com

Ridiculousness doesn’t kill, quite the contrary. Hilary Galbreaith uses slapstick and amateurism as critical and political weapons. The artist is part of an artistic heritage in which an experimental underground hybridizes with punk, feminist and queer cultures. Their protean works, at the crossroads of installation, painting, writing and sound, manifest a liminal, fluid, deliberately troubled and necessarily non-binary way of thinking. The artist’s aim is to dismantle systems of power - one after the other. Aware of the interweaving nature of these systems (racism, sexism, classicism, colonialism, capitalism, heteronormativity, fascism, necropolitics, patriarchy, etc.), Hilary Galbreaith makes the mechanisms and workings of these ideological machines visible in a joyful, intersectional way. The artist develops experimental documentaries in which video, performance (notably the staging of their self and of the communities involved) and installation enable them to combine reality and fiction. Experimental documentary is a territory without borders, norms or rules. Hilary Galbreaith’s projects are based on documented stories and events, while infiltrating other narrative forms such as (science) fiction and auto-fiction. They write: “In recent years, the acceleration of climate change, warmongering and the frightening rise of the far right in many countries both in Europe and America have led me to question the predominant role of SF fabulation in my work. Nothing I could invent seems stranger or more relevant than what is currently happening to our planet.” By making visible and de-silencing stories considered minor, Hilary Galbreaith shatters the dominant narrative by introducing feminist, queer, decolonial, ecological and classist struggles. With a firm determination to de-hierarchize earthly communities, they embrace human and more-than-human relationships, filling the bodies of those who refuse to be confined to minorities, binarities and assignments with joy, dignity and pride. The artist turns the founding myths of the dominant narrative - a powerful generator of alienation, oppression and death - on their heads, to sing, represent, embody and propagate other models of identification, other ways of living, other ways of seeing, tasting, thinking, making society, being in the world - joyfully - horizontally - bizarrely – collectively.

Julie Crenn, 2024

7.30 pm: dinner at Coco Zeus (10 Place Rallier du Baty, Rennes)
with Malgorzata Kazmierczak, President, and Marc Partouche, Secretary-General of AICA, and the participants of the AICA Academy

09.30 am-11.45 am: studio visits (artists listed below)

Born in 1997
vincent.louis.girard@gmail.com

Originally from Poitou, as a child I was immersed in the fantastical tales centred on the surrounding forests and marshes. The dolmens abandoned in the heart of towns or fields, the graves without bodies or epitaphs, and the ‘Main Rouge’—a veritable bogeyman of the marshes who drags you down to the bottom of the water—these stories form the foundation of what guides my current artistic exploration. In these tales, the landscape emerges as the central character. These collected accounts are the guardians of unsettling events on the fringes of History and our globalised daily lives; yet they touch upon ancient archetypes shared by regions both densely populated and remote. These stories, often silenced and hidden, nevertheless circulate through oral tradition, and some have been transcribed onto paper. My fascination with this literary material, and its evolving place within the landscape, speaks to me and evokes images and pictorial narratives within me, from which I love to draw inspiration in my painting.

Born in 1996
charlotte.delval@gmail.com

I practise sculpture (installations, objects and site-specific works) and writing (recording, reading, self-publishing), with water and soap as my favourite materials – though not exclusively. Ageing, wear and tear, the mouth, time, the shifting boundaries between clean and dirty, soft and hard, form visual compositions where the living and the non-living intermingle. This permeates my work and my relationship with the world. Every skin becomes hypersensitive, acne-ridden, wrinkled; every wall itches, spews forth its exploitation, its profitability, its ownership; every damp nook oozes with mould. My sculptures sometimes have a bling-bling, crude, gilded look; they are made of chains, fake pearls, and second-hand jewellery. My practice is not about the gigantic; it resides in the body, the guts, words, shelters, cellars, flats, bed sheets: the intimate. My forms emerge where internal and external boundaries crumble in favour of a revolt against efficiency and control. I am currently working by melting down and remelting my soap. I embrace the breakage, the cracks and the occasional difficulty in preserving my work in order to counter the ‘immortality’ of the artwork. I shed light on the possibilities of the multiple lives my sculptures take on (working with ageing pieces, remodelled ones and new ones). I adopt a frugal, cyclical approach to my production through the process of remaking. The cycle evokes a circle, but upon closer inspection, I see a body that falls, walks, learns, gets a plaster cast, is (re)stitched, needs a armchair, a massage, electromagnetic waves, crutches, smoke, sex, love. I work with these times and these narratives. This is why writing and sculpture are deeply interconnected in my work. Both are visual, plastic, sonic and performative; increasingly, I am exploring their co-dependence in my research.

Born in 1967
contact@jocelyncottencin.com

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.

Anthony Ogochukwu Agbapuonwu
Curator, writer and strategy consultant

Anthony Ogochukwu Agbapuonwu (b. 1995, Lagos, Nigeria) is a curator, writer and strategy consultant whose cultural practice explores the intersections of heritage, indigenous knowledge systems, the human psyche, urban studies and socio-political histories. His curatorial practice and writings engage African philosophies and contemporary lived realities to examine questions of belonging, movement, and the transformative power of art. His projects trace how histories, bodies, and geographies intersect, while foregrounding artistic practices that engage material and immaterial worlds, ancestral memory, and the politics of space. In 2025, Agbapuonwu curated Anyanwu: The New Light at the National Museum, Lagos, a landmark exhibition engaging Igbo cosmology and the broader cultural matrix of Nigeria. He recently completed a curatorial residency at Cité internationale des arts, Paris, under the RESONANCE programme by Cité internationale des arts, ART X Lagos, and Institut français du Nigeria, where his research examined how artists and marginalised communities create alternative cultural infrastructures and ethical tactics, placing Lagos and Paris in conversation.

Samuel Hernández Dominicis
Historian, researcher, curator and art critic

Samuel Hernández Dominicis (b. 1987, Havana, Cuba) is an art historian, researcher, curator and art critic. He holds a BA in Art History from the University of Havana (2011) and an MA in Art Studies from Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City (2019). He has served as editor of ArteSur magazine, was part of the team that launched the Institutional Collection of the Cuban National Council for the Visual Arts (CNAP), and held the positions of Technical Deputy Director of the Center for the Development of the Visual Arts (CDAV) and National Advisor for Visual Arts at the Hermanos Saíz Association (AHS). Since 2018, he has taught Art History at the Instituto de Cultura Superior (ICS) in Mexico City and, since 2022, has been a lecturer in the Art History and Modern Art diploma programmes at the Centro de Estudios Visuales (CEVI). He is Vice President of AICA International, President of AICA Cuba, and Chair of the AICA Archives and Living Memory Committee.

Dr. Elaine A. King
Professor Emerita at Carnegie Mellon University, art historian, critic and curator

Dr. Elaine A. King is Professor Emerita at Carnegie Mellon University and a distinguished art historian, critic, and international curator. Over a prolific career bridging academia and institutional leadership, she served as Executive Director and Curator of the Carnegie Mellon Art Gallery and Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. Dr. King has curated over 30 solo exhibitions for definitive contemporary artists and organized more than 20 major thematic group exhibitions. A recipient of numerous honors — including fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, the National Portrait Gallery, and the National Endowment for the Arts — her scholarship has been twice recognized by the American Association of Museums. As a widely published critic and co-editor of Ethics and the Visual Arts, Dr. King remains an active global voice on contemporary culture, museum ethics, and artistic censorship.

Ingrid Lyons
Writer, artist and performer

Ingrid Lyons is a writer, artist and performer based in Ireland. Merging fictional writing, musical sequencing, art writing, object gathering and public performance, Lyons' practice investigates how art, language and material can co-exist within singularly or collaboratively produced texts, objects and environments. Her embodied research is deeply rooted in art history, Irish folklore and social histories which she distils through mazes of resilience, dreamlike scenarios, humour and critique to create layered narratives, blurring boundaries between intangible and material worlds. Her working process includes collecting visual fragments alongside oral histories with materialisation ranging from cultural critique, fictional text, script writing, musical composition, publishing, drawings, cassette tapes, photographs, textiles and mind maps. Lyons considers the intersection between fiction writing, performance, art writing and curation as a means of exploring the dissemination of oral histories through storytelling and practices of cultural preservation. Experimental in its form, her work looks at how we return to or conjure places and individuals that hold cultural significance.

Anna Voswinckel
Curator specialising in photography and lens-based media

Anna Voswinckel is a curator of contemporary art specialising in photography and lens-based media in Berlin. Most recently, she was co-curator of Kraków Photomonth 2026. From January 2023 to October 2024, she was curator of the exhibition programme at Camera Austria in Graz, where she organised projects such as 'Exposure/Double Exposure', as well as solo exhibitions featuring Alexandra Leykauf, Anouk Tschanz, Ana de Almeida and Huda Takriti. Alongside her curatorial work, Anna Voswinckel has many years' experience teaching artistic photography — for example at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig — and has also engaged with photography, art and visual politics through artistic, journalistic and editorial projects.