Appropriating visual artworks, as one interprets the works in a repertoire: here, a sculpture by Rodin, self-portraits of famous photographers, and a play whose writing is attributed, as part of the fiction, to an author of another era. Judging that, among all the works that exist, these ones still resonate sufficiently in the eyes and ears of contemporary spectators to justify the reignition of their interrogatory or denunciatory spark. What do these works say once they undergo a corporeal and performative reinvestment and then are transposed into images in an installation environment?
ADAD HANNAH ET DENYS ARCAND
Les Bourgeois de Vancouver
The encounter of these two artists produces something quite stunning: the first places his formal preoccupations within a story, and the second places the narrative device in a tableau. The artwork, the source of which is a monumental sculpture by Rodin in which Hannah is particularly interested, transposes an allegory of the bourgeois nation into a representation of its dissolution in the era of economic globalization.
with an essay by Sébastien Hudon
CHUCK SAMUELS
The Photographer
Samuels revisits the history of photography by identifying himself with the figure of the photographer as manifested in a series of well-known historical self-portraits. He does so by re-creating the poses and expressions of these photographers, then substituting his own face for theirs. It is perhaps a way of imparting some weight of history to the contemporary selfie, but mainly of bringing out and reclaiming a rich tradition.
with an interview by Chuck Samuels
ALTHEA THAUBERGER
Marat Sade Bohnice
A sort of vertigo occurs with the reprise of a play by Peter Weiss, supposedly written by Sade and performed by the patients of the Charenton asylum, where Sade himself wrote and directed a number of plays. Thauberger “replays” this work in a performance by a theatre troupe and patients at the Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital in Prague, plunging us into a whirlpool of eras in which madness, imprisonment, assassination, and revolution intermingle.
with an essay by Geneviève Chevalier
Jacques Doyon