The title of the exhibition, “Empire, State, Building,” refers to three aspects of Société Réaliste’s work.

First of all, “Empire, State, Building” obviously evokes the famous New York skyscraper, the “building/temple/monument/work of art” that, ever since its completion in 1931, has been both a myth and emblem of the United States, and a source of artistic inspiration (from the Merian C. Cooper/Ernest B. Schoedsack film King Kong in 1933 to Empire, Andy Warhol’s silent movie, made in 1964).

Secondly, the exhibition explores the possibilities of punctuation, insofar as it can be used to order or disorder discourse. Finally, the name of the myth, when altered by the disorder of signs, becomes something different, a grid decreasing the scales of perception and power, from empire to building, via the state.