From films to plastic works, from environments to videos, a broader conception of cinema is embodied in this artist who conceives the moving image as the deployment of our soul, an interface allowing the different processes, visible and invisible, which filter through. drive us.
Offering an immersive project for all spaces where animals and humans, ghosts and forests, living and dead coexist in sleepy inter-worlds, the artist echoes the perceptual and cosmomorphic approaches of the IAC de Villeurbanne and the Space Laboratory. brain: the obscurity of his works takes on a subversive power, as if the experience of the night could transform us and reactivate our conversation with the living. At the heart of this alternative half-light, it is a question of deploying a relational ecology which is a true science of compassion.
Know everything here on the video exhibition.
«Periphery of the night»
Dotted with dark rooms and composed of around twenty works, including unpublished pieces, the exhibition multiplies the supports and projection devices, shaping as many initiatory environments in which a real art of expansion is exercised. Carried by the bewitching rhythm of the videos, their play of shadows and lights, the penetrating sound fabric that accompanies them, the visitor is invited to move from one to the other in a state of altered consciousness, on the border between wakefulness and sleep.
On the edge of the jungle
It is this edge, this nocturnal “periphery” that the artist explores, he who spent his childhood on the edge of the jungle. The periphery of the night: a distinct space-time and yet within reach, a stone’s throw from daylight. From the outset, in Apichatpong Weerasethakul, plastic beauty, the object of the gaze, is extended by a broader poetic meaning, which notably affects language: this literary tendency to metaphor permeates his works, from inside as well as from outside. – the artist regularly accompanying his videos with poems or allegorical stories. The image cannot account for everything; we have to open it, confront it with other ways of perceiving, so that the colors, micro-movements, light and sensations that animate his videos are reflected more finely in us. The spatialization of his work, far from making us passive, gives us the opportunity to practice this heightened sensoriality, makes us physically fit the contours (…)
The incomparable sweetness of his gaze on these beings coexists with the bitterness linked to the Thai political situation, explicitly mentioned in several videos. But beyond the references to power and the army, it is at the heart of his perceptual quest that Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s political gesture is rooted: for him, the camera is capable of bringing to light, by touching the real, an invisible community, the network of forces that run between beings and things, between different forms of life (animal, plant, spectral). The technique and the spiritual merge at the heart of the same process of revelation, which would extend our inner cinema, this “projection apparatus” to which the artist compares the human mind. Endowed with this capacity to probe and bring out the invisible, the moving image appears as the refuge of secret links, a fragile sanctuary that must be preserved from external aggressions. The dozing bodies that populate the videos in the exhibition are said to be the guardians of this virtual memory, swinging from dream to dream to exchange their knowledge and maintain its vitality.
For any contact:
INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART
11 rue Docteur Dolard
69100 Villeurbanne – France
t. +33 (0)4 78 03 47 00
f. +33 (0)4 78 03 47 09
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