ALTERNATIVE REALITIES
EXHIBITION
SEPTEMBER 2022 - AMSTERDAM
CURATED BY DAMARICE AMAO, CURATOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY CENTRE POMPIDOU
In terms of trajectory, generation and artistic interests, few common points unite the artists selected for this exhibition. However, each of their proposals reveals a precise attention to the means of their disciplines, a will to explore their limits, most often thanks to the possibilities offered by innovative resources stemming from digital technologies. The hybridization of practices that are well established in the artistic landscape - installation, film, sculpture, video, performance and photography in all its possibilities of augmentation - are placed at the service of new representations of complex contemporary realities.
Thus, projects questioning the nature and construction of images in the digital age (Jaya Pelussy, Jaehun Park) stand alongside others whose autobiographical and intimate subtexts offer stimulating reflections on the construction of identity (Laura Hospes, Neoza Goffin, Marcin Dudek). Other projects invite the spectator to awake his or her senses in the face of devices that play on the effects of visual and sensory perceptions (Lucile Boiron, Alice Pallot and De Anima, Michel Lamoller). Finally, emancipation from the norms of the documentary form does not mean the impossibility of telling the Great Story or taking a critical look at current social realities. This is the case with certain installations that invite the visitor to take intriguing narrative and formal side roads without sacrificing the search for meaning (Vita Buivid, Poulomi Basu, Laurence Aëgerter, Anna Malagrida).
All these works reflect assertive approaches, demanding reflection on images and their impact. They also show the desire to reengage the viewer in a more active role, to make him/her an actor in all these alternative, complementary and necessary realities that these artists are offering us here.
Neoza Goffin
STARSEED CAME DOWN TO BRING UNALOME
2022
MULTI MEDIA INSTALLATION, VIRTUAL REALITY
Neoza Goffin is an artist-therapist who sees her artistic practice primarily as a collective and political spiritual experience. As master of ceremonies, she invites visitors to apprehend other ways of living and perceiving our world, in harmony with their bodies, with their sexuality and with others.
In ‘Starseeds came down to bring Unalome’, her very personal syncretism summons up a New Age imagery where symbolism inspired by the Far Eastern thought mixes with a contemporary aesthetic drawing on pop and an assumed "girly" universe. Pastel colours and tactilely sensual materials are all elements that compose this actual room of sensory and visual deconditioning exalting the power of the feminine.
Jaya Pelupessy
RGB-BIRDS
2022
16mm FILM INSTALLATION
Artist researcher and collector of photographic process manuals, Jaya Pelupessy is interested in the techniques of reproduction of the medium. Through his archaeology of old and new processes, Pelupessy deconstructs the production processes of analogue and digital images in order to re-arrange them or even better, to hybridize them.
With Rgb – Birds, Pelupessy tackles the RGB colour space used in computing, breaking down its layers by filming three red, green and blue parrots in turns. Their respective images are merged through the projection of three 16mm films into a strange moving photograph inviting the spectators to become aware of the modes of perception and consumption of images today.
Jaehun Park
HIGHWAY EPIGRAM
2022
3D DIGITAL SIMULATION VIDEO, 10' LOOP
Describing himself as a digital sculptor, Jaehun Park mobilises the resources of the most advanced 3D technology to compose animated virtual landscapes translating his disenchanted vision of the contemporary world. In contrast to the positive and somewhat soothing discourse on the new possibilities offered by digital technology, his post-apocalyptic compositions feature everyday objects in infinite algorithmic spaces, the symbols for the author of the structures of the capitalist world and of mass consumption doomed to imminent destruction.
In Highway Epigram, Park simulates a mad virtual race that plunges the spectator into a universe of crash and destruction of objects and buildings representing the hell that our real world has become. Nothing can be saved.
Laura Hospes
NO MAN'S LAND
2022
PERFORMANCE & HOLOGRAM
Laura Hospes has made her body, and more precisely her skin, the most faithful ally of a performative practice, successor to the paths opened in the 1970s. Celebrating it for its organic functions and the role it plays in her personal psychic structuring, Hospes uses her skin as a material, more precisely as a sensitive surface whose uses she sublimates through envelopment or constraint.
For the filmed performance No Man's Land, Laura Hospes progressively frees her plaster-covered body-totem for a physical as well as psychological exposure, questioning the limits of intimacy and the viewer's gaze in front of this ritualized experience.
Vita Buivid
THE DISTANCE IS…
2023
GLASS PLATE PHOTO SCULPTURES & SOUND
For more than thirty years, Vita Buivid has been using photography in a reflective way. She tests the limits of the medium and its primary function of recording reality, composing hybrid works combining painting and embroidery, among others. These works are reflections on her personal experience, her identity as a woman and as an artist in the context of the post-Soviet society in which her practice is emerging.
In Distance is…, Buivid features photographic sculptures made of glass plate negatives found at flea markets. Buivid turns this set of disparate 'houses of cards', each topped with a digital audio player, into a space for a collective memory that is about to be made invisible. This Utopian monument gathers the nostalgic testimonies of immigrants like her, which she has recently been able to collect.
Michel Lamoller
UNTITLED
FROM THE 'ANTHROPOGENIC MASS' SERIES
2022
INSTALLATION
Michel Lamoller's practice is based more on his mastery of the scalpel than the camera. However, photography is the starting point for his work on contemporary urban landscapes and their asphyxiating density. Each of Lamoller's compositions is the result of a long process of hand-crafting, in which the cropping and superimposition of several prints from the same image produce compositions that oscillate between sculpture and photography, impossible to reproduce.
In the large-scale versions of these constructed landscapes, the visitor is invited to enter directly into the space of the work and to recompose the possible points of view, as part of a total perceptual experience in situ mobilizing both the body and the gaze.
Poulomi Basu
THE MOON PALACE
2022
VIDEO AND VIRTUAL REALITY , NEON AND SONIC SOUNDSCAPE, MONITORS AND PLANTS
At the crossroads of art, new technologies and engagement, eco-feminist artist Poulomi Basu has turned her works into spaces that confront the viewer with the visible and latent violence of the patriarchal system, whose power extends into the intimacy of women.
Basu's long-term investigations and collaborations bring her into close contact with the reality of marginalised women, particularly in her native South Asia : female soldiers in To conquer her Land, indigenous guerrilla communities in Centralia, and women forced into menstrual exile in Nepal in Blood Speaks.
In Basu's work, the documentary approach is always coupled with fiction and the imaginary in order to produce new narratives, and to trace possible paths to resilience and justice.
In the transdisciplinary installation The Moon Palace, Basu extends in a symbolic form the work done in Blood Speaks on the social, psychological and physical consequences of menstrual exile:
"This multidisciplinary work references the past and looks to the future. The totemic structure references ancient symbols of spiritual power, and the use of broadcast monitors alludes to notions of surveillance and the inherent power to be found in the patriarchal and brahmanical gaze. Within this clash of perspectives, the women stare from the screen, their gaze challenging our position as viewer, questioning the nature of exile, not as something physical but as something metaphorical: an exile of the mind within which we are all complicit."
Lucille Boiron
HOW TO BE PERFECT
2021
UV PRINT UNDER PLEXIGLASS
Lucile Boiron has turned her camera into a fascinating tool for dissecting reality, which she uses to examine the female body without indulgence, and to question the way in which its idealisation is shaped.
In her previous series Mise en pièces, she fragmented and decontextualized with close-ups, pieces of truncated, bloated and indecent bodies subjected to surgical work. These photographs of inert flesh come into dialogue with more personal images and still lifes with an alluring mortifying seduction.
With How to be perfect, Boiron continues her work on terrifying, edible and perishable beauties in the form of soft, biomorphic sculptures in Plexiglas. Through this dripping chaos of flesh and fluids, Boiron experiments new spaces of representation of the body, assuming their organic ambivalence and their vibrating visceral reality.
Anna Malagrida
LES PASSANTS
2020- 2021
VIDEO INSTALLATION
For several years, Anna Malagrida has been developing a careful work of observation of urban metropolises, whose spaces she explores with her camera. Her survey is an opportunity to probe gestures, singularities as well as invisible frontier zones that nevertheless reveal latent socio-political realities.
In this respect, Les Passants series constitutes a cartography of the city of Paris at the time of Covid-19. For almost a year, Malagrida set up her camera in a dozen places, for several hours. The fixed point of view systematically adopted is reminiscent of that of surveillance cameras, the impact of which she questions in our modes of apprehending urban space. Through its set-up, Les Passants invites us to immerse ourselves in the oppressive temporality of this disturbing city, where the solitude of passers-by sends us back to painful intimate and collective realities.
Laurence Aëgerter
CONFETTI
2019
58 038 PHOTOGRAPHIC CONFETTI PIECES
Laurence Aegerter's great visual erudition allows her to question the power of images and their place in our collective unconscious. Her games of transpositions and displacements take the form of various devices that testify to the richness and inventiveness of her plastic experiments: from photography to ceramics, installation and tapestry.
To classify, select, store, or delete: the work Confetti is significant of the dilemmas that each of us faces when confronted with the uninterrupted flow of images that we produce or share every day thanks to our "smartphone". Here, Aegerter proposes a joyful and liberating solution to the problem by turning into confetti 58,038 personal images produced and stored for almost 10 years in his phone.
Laurence Aëgerter
DIOGENES
2020
JACQUARD WOVEN TAPESTRY ON MONOFILAMENT CHAIN WOOL, RECYCLED POLYESTER AND PHOSPHORESCENT THREADS
Laurence Aegerter's visual erudition allows her to question the power of images and their place in our collective unconscious. Her games of transpositions and displacements take the form of various devices that testify to the richness and inventiveness of her plastic experiments: from photography to ceramics, installation or even tapestry, a field in which she has distinguished herself for several years.
With Diogenes, a monumental tapestry of complex construction, Laurence Aëgerter tackles the history of a World War II bunker located in Arnhem in the Netherlands. Young German women worked there day and night for the Nazi air force, marking Allied forces’ positions on a monumental grid map. Each enemy position was indicated by a light.
For her tapestry, Aegerter started from a photograph showing the destruction of the interior of the bunker, which she superimposed on the grid of codes of this air battle conducted in this claustrophobic space. Woven in phosphorescent threads, the outline of each of these motifs appears at regular intervals in the darkness.
An immersive work, Diogene invites the spectator to a sensory and reflexive experience on the ambivalences of history.
Alice Pallot & De Anima
OYSTER MUSHROOM ORCHESTRA
2022
MIXED MEDIA & MUSHROOMS INSTALLATION
Alice Pallot's photographic work reflects her interest in science, the organic world, natural phenomena and more specifically the different relationships that individuals have with the environment. Distancing herself from documentary neutrality, Pallot composes phantasmagorical worlds through images charged with lyricism and chromatic sensoriality.
Produced with the multidisciplinary collective De Anima, OMO explores alternative modes of conversation with living beings, here more precisely with mushrooms whose formidable inter-species communication capacities have recently been demonstrated. Pallot and de Anima have developed a device to capture and translate the frequencies emitted by the mycelium of oyster mushrooms. This strange music punctuates the flow of images projected in the installation and invites us to become aware of the intelligence of living beings, in a sensitive way.
Marcin Dudek
SEKTOR
2021
INSTALLATION
Marcin Dudek produces works - installations, performances, paintings, collages, anti-ready-made objects - through which he questions the mechanisms of violence, social control, collective behaviour and the alienation of individuals in our modern societies.
Imbued with his past as a football fan in Poland in the 1990s, his creations are the product of an aesthetic of recovery. Clothes, lamps, photographs of the artist or of archives, pieces of iron, scotch tape, ashes, papier-mâché, coloured pigment, resin are combined in a neurotic way in installations that are meant to be spaces of cathartic exultation.
For Sektor, Dudek produces a kind of memory box in the form of a metal cage, in which he has placed objects, documents and photographs relating to the violent history of the hooligan subculture, of which he acts as a sensitive transmitter.
