Sylvie Blocher
S’inventer autrement (To reinvent oneself differently)
8 November 2014–25 May 2015
Opening and press view: 7 November
Mudam Luxembourg
Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean
3, Park Dräi Eechelen
L-1499 Luxembourg-Kirchberg
T +352 45 37 85 1
F+352 45 37 85 400
info [at] mudam.lu
www.mudam.lu
dreams.lu
Curator: Enrico Lunghi
Since the early 1990s, the French artist Sylvie Blocher has built up a body of video work that takes the human as its material—one that is fragile and unpredictable but charged with extreme presence. She engages with a poetics of relation, emancipation, the questioning of identities, the writing of history, the permeability of the masculine/feminine border, and codes of representation in a world under control. Created in different geographic regions, her works are based on exchange: they often involve the participation of external people, who are invited to present themselves in a completely new fashion before the camera, as the artist “shares her authority with her models” to create what she calls Living Pictures.
The creation of a participative work and a movie
“It will be the story of an event at a museum in Luxembourg in which the visitors will not be content to look politely at the works, but decide impulsively to experience leaving the world for a few minutes, in a journey filmed and broadcast, a story of fragmented, floating bodies. Then a movie, the start of another story.”
–Sylvie Blocher
The solo exhibition to be presented at Mudam Luxembourg revolves around an ambitious project titled Dreams Have a Language, which combines a participativework, a video installation and the production of a movie.
During the first weeks of the exhibition, the museum’s Grand Hall will become a fully active film studio that centres on the operation of a flying machine 12 metres tall. Through the placement of an ad in various media, Sylvie Blocher will invite the public at large to visit the museum to leave the ground for a few minutes and to “rethink the world.” “Shooting conditions: allow one hour and present yourself at Mudam with an idea to change the world. It might be poetic, political, aesthetic, emotional, revolutionary, scientific, architectural, educational, financial, culinary, sonic, etc.”
Forming the content for a video installation at the centre of the exhibition, the pictures of the suspended bodies will be the starting point for a movie created with Luxembourg director Donato Rotunno, release of which is planned for spring 2015. By combining a documentary approach with fictional writing, the movie will offer “an assemblage of words, gestures and moments that will open up an imaginary universe, an expectancy, a suspense.”
A monographic exhibition
In the two galleries on the garden level, ten or so works—video installations and drawings—will present themes central to Sylvie Blocher’s work: the sharing of responsibility, the question of politics, identity, dreams and utopia. By using music to give new life to important speeches and manifestos made in contemporary history (by Angela Davis, Édouard Glissant and Barack Obama, among others), the five videos that comprise the series “Speeches” (2009–12), which are part of the Mudam Collection, engage with the political dimension of the imagination, individual and collective.
Other works, like the diptych Change the Scenario (Conversation with Bruce Nauman) (2013) and the three videos recently created by Sylvie Blocher in Texas, tackle historic and racial aspects in the construction of the individual.
Placed at the entrance to each of the galleries, a series of drawings that the artist has made every day for a year, based on the front page of the newspaper Libération, places emphasis on the passages between the personal and the political initiated by her practice.
Parallel to the exhibition S’inventer autrement at Mudam, the Gallery Nosbaum Reding in Luxembourg presents from 8 November to 31 January 2015 a solo exhibition by the artist.
The exhibition is organised in collaboration with Tarantula Luxembourg and Centre regional d’art contemporain Languedoc-Roussillon, Sète.
Press inquiries
presse [at] mudam.lu / T +352 45 37 85 633
