Aude Moreau: The Political Nightfall

Curator: Louise Déry

The photographic, film and sound works of Aude Moreau cast a hitherto unexampled light on the North American city, with its modernist grid, its towers soaring to breathtaking heights, its illuminated logos speaking the language of the multinationals, its solids that box us in, its voids that provide an exit. Because the artist embeds film in architecture, writing in glass, politics in economics, transparency in opacity, indeed the private in the public, she deflects and refashions the iconography of these often stereotypical urban images, whose future shows no way around the gathering political darkness.

The exhibition features the film The End in the Background of Hollywood, shot by helicopter over Los Angeles, with the twin towers of the City National Plaza conveying a powerful end-of-the-world message. In tandem, Inside (23/12/2014 – Los Angeles, Downtown) offers a street view of one of the towers and its mundane nocturnal activity, while The Last Image shows generic endings of films about the end of the world. The starry night of the world film capital is also captured in several photographs showing the iconic Hollywood sign and the illuminated logos of big financial corporations studding the sky. Visitors will visit Sortir, shot from a helicopter circling the Montreal Stock Exchange, Reconstruction, a moving panorama of the Manhattan skyline from the Hudson River, and discover LESS IS MORE OR … on Mies van der Rohe’s towers in Toronto.

By investing architecture with a metaphorical power that lies between reality and fiction, between the image itself and what it recounts, Moreau makes us spectators of the present: we are subjected to the mechanisms of power and grapple with the catastrophic scenarios that flow by in an endless loop. The artist’s thinking and observations on the city derive from Gordon Matta-Clark, Ed Ruscha and Mies Van der Rohe; created between 2008 and 2015, the four groups of works included in this exhibition give the leading role to Montreal, New York, Los Angeles and Toronto. They exhort us to immerse ourselves in the texture of their images and sounds, to enter the temporality of a relentless end, to cross through the space between the images and, in that movement, perceive a world at rest, perhaps its final rest.

In 2009, Casino Luxembourg – Forum d‘art contemporain presented the exhibition Tirer le Ciel by Aude Moreau.

Watch the the interview by Aude Moreau on Casino Channel.
 

The exhibition was produced by Galerie de l’UQAM, in collaboration with Casino Luxembourg, Centre culturel canadien in Paris and The Power Plant in Toronto. With the support of: Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Délégation générale du Québec à Bruxelles.