Bertille Bak
She lives and works in Paris.
An “experimenter in the field”, Bertille Bak weaves personal and collective stories through her works. By gathering testimonials from the communities she joins for a while, the artist highlights elements of reality, using this diverse material as the basis of her work, to create films, drawings, and installations. She then instils new communal actions within these often fragile groups, in order to shed light on their condition via alternative pathways, attempting to build together new ways of presenting themselves and resisting. This little factory of joyful and insubmissive stories thus reveals the murmur of forgotten societies.
Bertille Bak was born in Arras in 1983. She is represented by the Galerie Xippas, Paris, Geneva, Montevideo, and Punta Del Este; as well as the Gallery Apart in Rome. Her work has been presented at, among others, the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing (China), the National Museum of Art in La Paz (Bolivia), the Wooyang Museum of Contemporary Art (Korea), the Contemporary Art Centre of Geneva and the MAMCO (Switzerland), the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt (Germany), the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome (Italy), the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens (Greece), and the Palazzo Grassi in Venice (Italy), biennales in Calcutta (India), Istanbul (Turkey), and Documenta 14 in Kassel (Germany), at the Centre Pompidou Metz, the Musée de l’Histoire de l’Immigration, the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, and the Palais de Tokyo (France). Many places have dedicated solo exhibitions to her: the Fondation Mario Merz in Turin (2022); La Criée centre d’art contemporain de Rennes (2022); Le Cyclop de Jean Tinguely (2019); FRAC PACA (2017); the Grand Café (2014); City Dome, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh (2014); the Musée d’Art moderne de la ville de Paris (2012); the Mac/Val, Ivry (2011), etc.
Her works belong to collections such as that of the FNAC, the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens (Greece), the Musée des arts contemporains du Grand-Hornu (Belgium), the FMAC Geneva, the Collection François Pinault, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la création, among others.
In 2023, the Louvre-Lens will dedicate a major solo exhibition to her.
