Body Double
October 23–November 30, 2018
Curated by Selva Barni—Fantom
The first solo show by Brice Dellsperger in Italy introduces his work to the public through a selection of video-movies from his ongoing series “Body Double,” started in 1995. Installed with multiple screens and projectors across the 3 floors of Marsèlleria, the exhibition displays a large number of works to convey the richness, complexity, obsessiveness, and allure of Dellsperger’s work, and its enduring originality and relevance.
The source of the artist’s research is cinema, used as material to manipulate, recreate, subvert. Body Double takes its name from Brian De Palma’s eponymous 1984 movie and synthesizes the conceptual and physical articulations of Dellsperger’s work. In this series, together with his actor-alter ego Jean-Luc Verna, he remakes sequences of cult movies (De Palma, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Lynch, van Sant, Zulawski), playing all roles, masculine and feminine, and lip-synching original dialogues. In multiple, disorienting incarnations that question the artifice of cinema and issues of gender. While interlocking practices of appropriation and re-enactment, and mirroring the relationships between couples like author-viewer, subject-object, desire-representation, filming-editing.
The use of drag and camp, of the utterly artificial, the imperfections, the glitches, loops and duplications, destabilize the conventions of cinema and representation, and question the ways in which we project ourselves onto others—and ultimately represent ourselves. Addressing also the ordinary, overarching presence in our lives of the self-portrait, the backbone of imagination, and the construction of the self, in the age of social networks.
Brice Dellsperger was born in 1972 in Cannes (France). After studying fine arts for five years in Nice Villa Arson, he moved to Paris where he lives and works as a visual artist since 1995 and as a teacher at ENSAD since 2003. He is represented by galleries Air de Paris, Paris, and Team Gallery, New York. Dellsperger works have been exhibited in various locations such as MoMA (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), and various countries (Brasil, Germany, UK, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Japan). Dellsperger’s work is included in a number of prominent public collections including that of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
In collaboration with La Francia in Scena, art season of Institut français Italia, with the support of Institut français and Air de Paris.
Marsèlleria is the exhibition space and the multi-disciplinary platform created by Marsèll in 2009 under the artistic direction of Mirko Rizzi.
Hours: Monday–Friday 10am–1pm and 2–6pm, Saturday and Sunday by appointment
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