Film & Video (Film & Video)

Michelle Handelman’s video work Irma Vep, The Last Breath takes its inspiration from Musidora, a famous French silent film actress, and a character she played called Irma Vep, from the film Les Vampires (1915), directed by Louis Feuillade. The work uses these characters as metaphors to highlight the lives of those who live in the shadows—or feel like they do—and the anxiety they experience as marginalized figures. Musidora was a 20th-century feminist, who was known not only for acting in movies, but also for directing her own plays and films, and having secret affairs with Colette and other famous people of the time.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Dorian, a cinematic perfume, video is used as a community gatherer, a tool to speak about particular subcultures, in this case the trans-gender drag queen New York community, past and present. Developed from a literary work, it deconstructs notions of narrative forms, styles and conventions. It is a hybrid piece, an example of the elasticity of the medium.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Les Chenilles by Michelle and Noël Keserwany is a sensual film that translates the source of women’s oppression into the means for their liberation. In this narrative film, protagonists Asma and Sarah meet while working as waitresses in France. They both come from the Levant and, each in their own way, carry burdens of the past and the consequences of colonialism.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

La cabeza mató a todos or “The Head that Killed Everyone”, is a mixing of indigenous mythologies with present-day characters, geographies, and culture in Puerto Rico. The title refers to how a shooting star was (in local mythology) interpreted as a head without a body, crossing the sky, signaling the arrival of chaos and destruction. The actor in the video, Michelle Nonó, is in touch with native plants—she’s a medicinal botanist but also a cultural activist.

Installation (Installation)

Open Casket IX is an installation by Indira Allegra that combines traditional materials of memorial—tombstones, mausoleums, and caskets—with contemporary expressions of grief. The work is a memorial for people who have lost loved ones to police violence. It is part of Allegra’s Open Casket series, which is concerned with the need to recognize grieving as a collective responsibility, rather than an individual misfortune to be shouldered by one affected person or family.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The Town consists of footage taken from Auder’s studio of the skyline of New York, tracking planes as they fly across the sky and pass tall buildings. At the time of recording, like all of this films, there was no particular intent. However, in the aftermath of 9/11, this film becomes prescient and ominously prophetic.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Talking Head is a short film in black and white of Auder’s daughter Alexandra, hidden behind a hemp plant, playing with a plastic wrapper and babbling in an imaginative way. The viewer is uncertain whether Alexandra knows she is being filmed but given that Auder was constantly filming she was probably oblivious to it. Her statements make little sense to the outsider : ‘The thing never came back again.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

In Michel François’s work, « it is the real, physical and emotional experience that stimulates creation which is therefore highly charged with a vital force. There lies also the profoundly and clandestine figurative nature of his work » (Guillaume Désanges). Contamination is a constant in Michel François’s work.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Ein Ding Mehr , or ‘one more thing,’ is part of a long-term collaborative performance series by artists Wolfgang Prinz and Michel Gholam, which consist of the pair embodying an array of material through holding various poses for extended periods of time. As the artists perform each gesture, we see them gaze on the preparatory drawings, which act as an instructional score of sorts. The drawing itself, besides featuring carefully drawn sketches of each position, also contains a list of the source material that inspired them: a scene from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film, Salo, Eugène Delacroix’s Pietà, and a reference to a monument by Auguste Rodin among others.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

With the war-torn Beirut cityscape as its backdrop—urban alleys, glistening beaches, abandoned buildings—Eric Baudelaire’s complex film, The Ugly One , unfolds in a time and place that vacillates among revolutionary narratives of the past, the fragile and ever-changing political situation of the present, and attempts to piece together the memories of those that live, or once lived, in the city. Conceived as a sequel to his documentary The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images (2011), Baudelaire builds the structure of the film around a story told by Japanese New Wave film director Adachi, who also narrates the film. The plot line pivots around two lovers and former resistance fighters, Michel (played by Lebanese artist and actor Rabih Mroué) and Lili (Juliette Navis); their narratives fragment and reconfigure around the screenplay, which itself intertwines with Adachi’s own history, the act of making the film, and the self-conscious and sometimes improvisatory process of writing the script.

Photography (Photography)

The half-length portrait of Joe Shirley presents a man with a great presence, wearing several items that point to ancestral Native American culture. In this photograph, which is relatively poor in information, the projection screen in the background acts as a clue about the event: Bruno Serralongue went to the second phase of the ‘Sommet Mondial sur la Société de l’Information’ (or SMSI, World Summit on Information Society, in Tunis in November 2005). This portrait echoes another picture in the same series (Native Peoples Claim Their Right to Participate in the Information Society) in which Joe Shirley is just a silhouette amongst the speakers, whereas here he occupies the entire frame.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Soufiane Ababri’s desire to construct a historical family and a genealogy of queer kinships in Bedwork / Yes I AM sees him conjuring up a pantheon of gay writers and artists whose intellect has changed the course of human history and development, despite their outsider status. Figures as disparate as Michel Foucault, Glenn Ligon, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet, and André Gide populate Ababri’s drawing series in the artist’s signature naïf style, their homosexuality the thread that connects them. The series of over forty drawings are part of Bedwork, a larger project that Ababri began in 2015.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Reflecting upon the transformation of surveillance techniques since the panopticon to include contemporary 3-D facial recognition, AI, and the Internet, Shu Lea Cheang’s 3x3x6 – 10 cases 10 data restages the rooms of the Palazzo delle Prigioni—a Venetian prison from the sixteenth century in operation until 1922—as a high-tech surveillance space. Taking as its starting point the story of libertine writer Giacomo Casanova, imprisoned in the Prigioni in 1755, Cheang has conducted in-depth studies on ten historical and contemporary cases of subjects incarcerated because of gender or sexual dissent, including the Marquis de Sade and Michel Foucault, as well as contemporary cases from Taiwan and South Africa. Their fictionalized portraits become part of the exhibition’s system; the title of which refers to today’s standardized architecture of industrial imprisonment: a 3 x 3 square-metre cell constantly monitored by 6 cameras.

Photography (Photography)

Like many contemporary photographers who play with the codes of realism, Valérie Jouve composes her images, having already a more or less predetermined result in mind, in order to deliver a complex representation of the world instead of a bold presentation of facts. A part of the series “Les Figures”, this “portrait’ of P. Faure carries a strong ambiguity, typical of the photographer’s images, between realism and mise-en-scene . This photograph is exemplary of Valérie Jouve’s work: inscription of an inidual within an urban landscape, relation to architecture, simplicity of composition and strong, yet imprecise narrativity – related in part to seemingly familiar characters or places.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Secteur IX B is full of ghosts: some that you can see, briefly appearing at the turn of a statue in an under construction museum, some that you only dream of when you switch from day to night, of one space to another. Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc invites us to follow a main character, Betty, an ethnographer currently leading research in the archives of the Theodore Monod Museum for African Arts, in Dakar. Punctuated by an anguished soundtrack and borrowing tropes from thriller genre films to create a sense of oddity, the film comments on the contemporary effects of colonial legacy in cultural institutions.

Painting (Painting)

In 1970, Ruscha began a series of paintings made from stains. He experimented with a variety of materials (gun powder, dust, blood, among many others) to leave surface traces of different objects. The resulting images are negative shapes amidst blurry environments like Splinters and Seconal in which a grey surface is imprinted with the materials mentioned in the title.