Emmanuelle Lainé: Incremental Self: Transparent Bodies

Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research is proud to pre­sent a solo exhi­bi­tion by Emmanuelle Lainé to re-open its newly refur­bished spaces.

Our lives are all but fragile and precarious. Yet they are multiple, collective, and uncontrollable. This is what artist Emmanuelle Lainé manifests in her exhibition Incremental Self: Transparent Bodies. The bodies we observe in her filmic installation—students, retired artists, workers—are in transitional places where different sorts of exchanges are taking place. They are evolving in spaces of negotiation where successive layers of identity are being performed in interaction with given economic, sensible, and even symbolic facts and objects. What should we do with of all these stories, anecdotes, and memories told by each and every one of us? How to make these narratives biting? To exhibit oneself is to demonstrate a form of resistance, while reconnecting with one’s own fragility. With Incremental Self: Transparent Bodies, we are inclined to explore the following question raised by philosopher Rosi Braidotti: “How [do we] find adequate theoretical and imaginary representations for our lived conditions and how [do we] experiment together with alternative forms of posthuman subjectivity”?(1) Emmanuelle Lainé’s exhibition is a demonstration of one’s taking shape, where humans and objects influence each other, assembling, overlapping, and mixing indiscernibly. Each permeates the other until conscience arises in their trembling selves, thus becoming transparent. Emmanuelle Lainé’s transparent bodies materialize our shifting, off-center, fragmented, and multiple identities. Even more, transparent bodies are contagious, contaminating each other.

(1) Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013, p.187

Emmanuelle Lainé (born in Paris in 1973) lives and works in Marseille. She graduated from the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris. Elaborating on the specifics of each exhibition venue, Emmanuelle Lainé uses the furniture and architectural features of her host institutions to provide a “methodology of places” connecting the spaces, the artworks and the audience. Her practice consists of monumental in-situ installations that blur the distinctions between the different media she uses. This process allows her to create a complex cognitive space where several temporalities coexist and only make sense to the spectator, who is considered to be the key player of the exhibition.  

She recently exhib­ited her works at the Palais de Tokyo (2017, 2014) and at Villa Vassilieff (2016) in Paris, at the Lyon Biennale (2015), at the GLstrand, (Copenhagen, 2015), at the Stereo Gallery (Warsaw, 2015), at the ICA Singapore (2015), at the Swiss Cultural Institute (Rome, 2014) and at La Loge Bruxelles (2013). Her works were also shown in per­sonal exhi­bi­tions hosted by the Villa Arson (2016), the Galerie Motinternational (Bruxelles, 2015), IFAL (Mexico, 2015), the foun­da­tion Ricard (2014) and C-o-m-p-o-s-i-t-e (Brussels, 2014).