Exhibition video walkthrough: Chris Ware at the 49th Angoulême International Comics Festival

 Building Chris Ware. Sonia Déchamps, Benoit Peeters and June Misserey. Angoulème. Salle Iribe - Espace Franquin. 17-20 March 2022.

Winner of the 2021 Grand Prix of the Angoulême International Comics Festival, Chris Ware was consecrated with a major exhibition that offered an intense visual and artefactual overview of his oeuvre.

Chris Ware's poster for the Angoulême Festival

The exhibition is packed with a generous collection of original pages (all on large format paper), ephemera, publications, models, toys, mock-ups, posters, para-comics projects, video interviews and animation - there is so much to take in all at once in such a compact space and time. It's akin to reading a Chris Ware comic! 

The enclosed video offers a walkthrough of the exhibition in order to give an idea of the dense sensory overload experience of the exhibition while also respecting the context of its spatial dimensions.      

A forthcoming blog entry will offer a thorough photographic record of BUILDING CHRIS WARE with some descriptive commentary for posterity. In the meantime, I hope this video offers a small taste of what it was like to see it onsite. 

 -Nick Nguyen

Video recorded by Nick Nguyen