Allons dormir
Solo show by Elias Kurdy
Curated by Marie de Gaulejac
with the collaboration of Hannibal Nseir for the guitar interpretation from May 7 to 8 for the Printemps de l’Art Contemporain, public opening on Saturday May 6 from 3:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. with a live piano performance by Mehdi Telhaoui at 6 p.m.
Conservatory Pierre Barbizet
An exhibition produced by Triangle–Asterides, a contemporary art center of national interest, with the support of INSEAMM – Beaux-Arts de Marseille and the DRAC PACAElias Kurdy thanks Beatričė Leitonaitė and Yahnis Rocailleux
The artist Elias Kurdy invites us, through his in-situ installation at the Pierre Barbizet conservatory, to immerse ourselves in a childhood memory that is at once tender, musical, distant and decomposed. A guitar recording[1] of a popular Near Eastern lullaby welcomes visitors and accompanies them like a branch under the claws of a bird. A swarm of hundreds of flying vertebrate animals made of bright yellow beeswax, whose size and shape are reminiscent of sparrows, come to inhabit the visual space. Modeled and captured in organic matter, all are inanimate and carefully placed on huge walls of wooden shelves. A sudden fall, poisoning or a predator? These birds are here without life, without explaination.
The abrupt image of the dead animal that the artist summons – to evoke violent and indelible events – contrasts with the imagining of hope and freedom that he also associates with the bird. The allegory of childhood through the lullaby remains in the eyes of Elias Kurdy an anchor point from which to consider the possible future or futures. The shaping of mental images here is a source of fictitious poetry that the artist manipulates and links to the passage of time; an alteration of memory that crisscrosses our lives and our emotions. “Broken images”, in the words of Elias Kurdy, which carry within them disappointments, joys and memories.
Featured as a part of the installation, on the opening night only, is a 12-minute live performance by pianist and composer Mehdi Telhaoui. It is a proposal for prepared piano[2] designed in close collaboration with Elias Kurdy for an intense listening experience in which the very body of the musician is called upon. In his composition, Mehdi Telhaoui works the notes and chords of the lullaby to give way, little by little, to fiction: an acceleration towards an outburst; drama then a return to softness, comfort and silence.
[1] Played and interpreted by artist Hannibal Nseir .
[2]A prepared piano is a piano whose sound is altered by placing various objects—the preparation—onto its strings. This methodology is considered an extended playing technique on the piano.
