Fiction / Performed readings #14
With this new season, the exploration of possible modes of public reading continues through original propositions by contemporary artists and writers.
Artist Zoulikha Bouabdellah will thus have her first performance in the form of a French-Arabic dialogue that highlights lexical borrowings between the two languages. Véronique Pittolo will propose a third stage of La Révolution dans la poche [« Revolution in the Pocket »], published in 2009 by Éditions Al Dante, augmented in 2010 with a USB key, and the object next year of an adaptation for the stage.
The evening will begin with a film by Annika Eriksson.
Since their creation in 2008, these evenings have already presented the work of over thirty contemporary artists and writers in the form of performances and videos, feeding into the ever more pregnant debate on the place of narration in contemporary creation.
With this new edition, the programming still cultivates the same taste for eclecticism, provoking unexpected encounters with various personalities.
BIOGRAPHIES
Zoulikha BOUABDELLAH
A French artist of Algerian descent, Zoulikha Bouabdellah raises the complex issue of a plural identity, a combination of simultaneous participations in several systems of social representations. Her works synthesize her double belonging, Eastern and Western, in a palpable dialogue of cultures that contributes to redefine a mixed national identity. In her video Dansons the artist, wrapped in a French flag, launches into a belly-dancing number to the tune of La Marseillaise; in La Pucelle (a self-portrait), she reproduces a famous bust from the collections of the Louvre museum – that of Joan of Arc’s, to which she lends her own features, setting the figure that has become an icon of French nationalism up as a symbol of multiethnic feminism.
A graduate from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Cergy, she has taken part in many international exhibitions, including at the Centre Pompidou, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the Venise and Bamako Biennales, as well as the Aïchi and Turin Triennales.
She is represented by the La Bank gallery in Paris.
Véronique PITTOLO
Véronique Pittolo has published a dozen books that tap into a collective imagination for motifs which then serve as the framework for a poetic prose. Starting from familiar figures, she reintroduces them in a new fiction. These characters may be a movie star (Gary Cooper ne lisait pas de livres [« Gary Cooper did not read books »], Al Dante, 2004), an opera singer (Opéra isotherme, Al Dante, 2005), Helen of Troy (Hélène, mode d’emploi [« Helen – Instructions for Use »], Al Dante, 2008) or even Schrek (Éditions de l’Attente, 2003), who thus become the « ready-made characters » of new narratives.
« I divert and transpose characters to graft them onto a pared-down writing that belongs both to the poetic and to the narrative. These characters come from tales, mythology, the cinema, they are anchored in our more or less fragmentary memories: what we know about them, what we have forgotten somewhat, what we would like to revive… This process allows me to tear down walls between genres, to displace elements, to loosen things up, work where they are not such a tight fit and sound differently. Narration comes in as a deconstructive principle that has something else emerge, a wobbly, hybrid form perhaps that belongs to the poem, the commentary, the formula, and logical lyricism all at once… »
Annika ERIKSSON
Annika Eriksson has been exploring the modes of representation of groups and the place of the individual within the collective since the early 1990s. She notably focuses on making perceptible the codifications that characterize every group and the symbolic pact that conditions belonging in it. She has thus made videos involving the whole staff of a museum, a group of amateur musicians, Berlin punks… In New York, on the occasion of the Performa Festival, she proposed Do You Want an Audience, a stage on which anyone could perform for a set amount of time.
For her film Anagram, the artist has collaborated with theatrical company Mooms (Malmö, Sweden), whose members are physically or mentally disabled actors. In this choreographic piece filmed in a single, immobile shot, actors attempt to reenact the well-known English proverb, « A chain is as strong as its weakest link. »
Eriksson has exhibited her work internationally: in New York as part of Performa, in Platform Garanti Istanbul, at the Cac in Vilnius, at the Venice and Sheffield Biennales, and recently at the Daad Galerie in Berlin.
