Les Possédé(e)s
Collective show with Tim Braden, Sophie Bueno-Boutellier, Cécile Dauchez, Guillaume Gattier, Theo Michael, Lidwine Prolonge, Fabrice Samyn, Analia Saban and Jocelyn Villemont
May 3 - June 2, 2012, public opening on Wednesday May 2, from 6:30PM
Galerie Hors-Les-Murs / HLM, 20 rue St Antoine, 13002 Marseille
The exhibition Les Possédé(e)s offers to observe the artwork as the site of negotiation between two dissonant voices: that of the world and that of the artist, through the allegory of the medium. The medium, a person “capable of perceiving messages from the spirits of the deceased,” achieves the feat of speaking for others—while, of course, having to convince their audience. They face the difficulty of transcribing these voices, which are foreign to them, as humbly as possible. Yet, in doing so, they paradoxically construct an authorial practice, distancing themselves from the mere role of servant.
The question is therefore not so much whether the medium speaks the truth, but rather to understand by what means and through which strategies they construct their discourse. The chimera of an objective artistic truth has been largely dismissed since the 1960s; since then, art has sought instead to reflect the growing complexity of our subjectivities in the face of the disintegration of a once singular world order. The artist emerges as a kind of translator of experiences, whose virtuosity alone determines whether they are an impostor or a demiurge—much like a medium deeply possessed by the spirits that animate them.
For this exhibition, works have been selected that bear witness to this tension between author and servant: the artist’s voice plays hide-and-seek with what they claim to represent. Heirs to a long artistic tradition (Analia Saban, Theo Michael), observers of civilizations (Jocelyn Villemont, Tim Braden), critical spokespersons for secret societies (Lidwine Prolonge, Guillaume Gattier), mystical agnostics (Sophie Bueno-Boutellier, Fabrice Samyn) or digital ones (Cécile Dauchez), these artists, like the possessed, often speak for something or someone else, yet always end up having the last word. When, in the artwork—the ultimate culmination of the artist’s mediumistic schizophrenia—subjectivity and universal truth merge to the point of indistinction, the violent feedback of our differences is momentarily silenced.
— Dorothée Dupuis
