CEAAC Centre Europeen d'Actions Artistiques Contemporaines

The Souls – A Twice-Told Tale

09 Feb - 19 May 2013

LISA HOLZER, DAVID JOURDAN, WESTPHALIE, DENIS PRISSET, LYNETTE YADOM-BOAKYE ...
The Souls – A Twice-Told Tale
Second segment of the Doppelgänger cycle
9 Février - 19 Mai 2013

Cécile Dauchez, Lisa Holzer, David Jourdan, Ciara Philips, Nagisa Oshima, Denis Prisset, Chloé Quenum, Markus Schinwald, Westphalie, Lynette Yadom-Boakye

The second segment of the Doppelgänger cycle, the exhibition The Souls – A Twice-Told Tale will pursue its exploration of the forms taken by splitting and doubling-up in the work of artists employing different media. Where the exhibition The Separate addressed the issue of division, with the individual’s psychic structure as the “theatre of operations”, this second group of works considers the matter from the point of view of “shared living “.

The title is borrowed from The Souls of Black Folk, the collection of writings by the African-American sociologist and activist W.E.B. Dubois (1868-1963). The exhibition will play on the veiling/unveiling structure Dubois used in his analysis of the moral and metaphysical devastation wrought by segregation: for the victims of the inequality segregation imposed, the impossibility of actually splitting the self was exacerbated by the fact of second-class citizenship. But while Dubois set out to describe the effects of the invisible veil, the exhibition, through its actual layout, will exemplify the situation’s structural principles.

This will entail reiterating – stating once again, but in another way – a paradoxical involvement with the world; and doing so via juggling with the conventions of language and custom (Lisa Holzer, David Jourdan, Westphalie) or on the most unremarkable everyday objects (Chloé Quenum). Paradoxical because inseparable from a detachment (from that same world) in terms of its formal interplay (Ciara Philips) or from the issue of representation and remembrance (Denis Prisset). At the same time, while the exhibition does not have a strictly post-colonial focus, it cannot neglect the issue either, if only because it borrows from the issue’s form. The works by Markus Schinwald and Lynette Yadom-Boakye, together with Nagisa Oshima’s film Three Resurrected Drunkards (currently being programmed) confront the question of stereotyping directly, sometimes by standing it on its head.

Vincent Romagny
 

Tags: Lisa Holzer, Chloe Quenum, Markus Schinwald