Des voix d'ici [Voices from here]
HD Video, color, sound, 44 min
2023
During my art residency at the Ateliers des Arques, I ask the inhabitants of the village and the surrounding area to tell me about their memories of works produced during past editions of the same residency. I accompany these stories with images of my wanderings on the site of these works.
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Dans le corps du texte [In the body of the text]
Reading, 40 min
With Axelle Pinot
2023
In a red room, we read my text entitled Dans le corps du texte, which consist of a montage with my reading notes and fifty-four quotes from books that helped me become who I am.
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Des êtres sociaux [Social beings]
Printing on dilite, 29,7x89,1 cm
2023
This image uses a quote from Monique Wittig who says that we are "formed by language". I appear shirtless, showing the tattoos made of words that I wear on my skin. All around other cications of different books read during these last years, which allowed me to see what I am. I realize how much I am made by this language.
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Ce qui est simplement pensable [What simply is thinkable]
Printing on dilite, 85x52 cm
2023
According to Judith Butler our language, in its limited grammar, prevents us from thinking beyond certain limits. Butler's quote is truncated here and leaves a big gap.
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Les bons vœux du Petit Robert [Le Petit Robert's good wishes]
Three printings on dilite, 85x52 cm each
2023
This triptych presents a raging passage from the book Les Sorcières de la République by Chloé Delaume. It is about sexist grammatical rules that we learned from childhood at school.
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Untitled (To the man in the mirror) — step 3
Performance, 25 min
2022
I dance in silence in front of the video documenting the performance Untitled (To the man in the mirror) — step 2. Each performance is a new step and will later become the background video for the next performance.
Photo: Catherine Goyette
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Untitled (To the man in the mirror) — step 2
Performance, 25 min
2021
Silentely again, sweaty again, I dance in front of the projection of the video recording of my performance Untitled (To the man in the mirror) which was therefore a first step. Here is a second one, in which the image of a past me and I sometimes dance in a duet, sometimes one on top of the other.
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That tired old question
Drawing, continuously growing dimensions
2020/2021
Between Super Mario and the works of my favorite artists - from Andrea Fraser to Louise Masson, I draw my dream museum in pixels, on the online game Manyland. As it's a multiplayer game, visitors are welcomed to walk around and interact with others.
link to the museum
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Quelque chose remue [Something stirs]Sound installation
2020
On the occasion of a tour in the garden of a hotel, I tell the story of extraordinary works that strange visitors are looking at. The further I go, the more it seems to me that all of this is nothing but the fruit of my imagination.
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Dear Brian and Peter
Print on paper, diptych, 29.7 x 21 cm each
2020
I write a letter to Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, authors of the 'Oblique strategies' (1975), even though they will never read it. The occasion to discuss the way ideas lead to projects, then to works of art and then to nothing.
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À venir (drag queen) [Forthcoming (drag queen)]
Performance, HD video, color, sound, variable duration (8 min here)
Image : Ophélie Demurger
2017/2019
I redo, as a drag queen, my 'À venir' performance, consisting of a walk through the empty space of the exhibition, just before the works are installed, to give a visit of the show and talk about all its works, thus carrying in me the memory of works that are still forthcoming. This time I do it as a drag queen.
Video link
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Étant donnée [Being data]
Performance, HD video, color, sound, 30 min
2018
Navigating between Paris, London, New York and Hong Kong, I describe the life of a data. As we wonder if Big Data is the new black gold though we can’t exactly explain what it encompass, I play with the poetry of scientific language and my own understanding of explanations I received from dozens of data scientists I met during the six months of this project.
Commissioned work and laureate of the 2017 International Francoise Competition by francoiseartmemo.fr with Ekimetrics
Video link
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À celles que tu ne verras jamais [To those you will never see]
Performance, text, screening, 1 h 30
2018
On the occasion of festival Extra! I perform daily in front of the camera, in the very spaces of the festival, before the arrival of the audience. I tell what I remember from the day before, and imagine what could happen later today. Performance and videos are therefore a form of living memory, necessarily fragmented, with its omissions and additions.
Coproduction Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne
Acknowledgements Axelle Pinot
Video link
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Open Variations
Screen printing, 50 x 70 cm
Printed at the Pôle Édition of Ensba Lyon
Ed. 50 + 7 AP
2018
Making both a list and an image, I gather all possible cubes after the variations of Open Cube and playing not only with the number of faces, but also with the points of view. In most cases, the Sol LeWitt cube has disappeared.
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Une autre forme de résurgence [Another form of resurgence]
Performance, 29 min
2018
When it's over, I recreate Claire Morgan's RESURGENCE exhibition through the speech, during a guided visit at the Fondation Francès.
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Ce qui m'échappe [What escapes me]
Wall drawing, variable dimensions
2017
The memory is always a form of rewriting. So I reproduce a wall drawing seen two years ago, without looking any image of the original work, and following nothing but the memory that I kept.
La BF15 exhibition and production, 2017
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The Bridegroom Suites I
With Axelle Pinot
After Guy de Cointet, The Bridegroom, 1983
Performance, 10 min
2017
I recreate with Axelle Pinot the posthumous – and unfinished! - performance of Guy de Cointet.
With the support of the Guy de Cointet Society
Courtesy Air de Paris
Photo: Robin Zenner/Playground (M Museum, Leuven)
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Moly la nuit [Moly by night]
HD video, color, sound, 18 min
2017
I take advantage of my residency at Moly-Sabata to spend the night in the En crue exhibition.
Video link
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À venir [Forthcoming]
Performance, HD video, color, sound, variable duration (38 min here)
Image : Axelle Pinot
2017
Walking through the empty space of the exhibition, just before the works are installed, I give a visit of the show and talk about all its works. I carry in me the memory of works that are still forthcoming.
Video link
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Construire un miroir [Building a mirror]
Performance, 20 min
Performers : Jade Belhocine, Jordan Derrien, Ninon Goutelle, Axelle Pinot and Frédérique Vivet
2017
At the Centre Pompidou (Paris), during a night of performance (Salon Discret), I come at the end of the program and I tell, by memory, all the performances and actions I saw during the last hours. Five performers reenact this after according to my speech.
Being separated from the audience by a glass, I have the lights slowly turned off, so the audience can see its own re ection appearing.
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Every secret has a holder
Long term performance
2016
I invite each and every visitor to give me a secret. In exchange I give them the last secret I have been told, without telling whom secret it is. Thus we all become the holder of someone else’s secret.
For each iteration, I start with the last secret I have been told during the last performance.
Photo: Benedict Johnson
Courtesy Nahmad Projects, London
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Œuvre d'art ne consistant qu'en l'acte de son achat [Work of art consisting only of its own purchase]Immaterial
2016
A work of mine that I didn’t make? April 2016, Ghislain Mollet-Viéville sent me a check to purchase a work of art consisting only of its own purchase, nothing else. Thus he moves the lines between the artist, the collector and the work of art itself.
Documentation on Ghislain Mollet-Viéville's website
Interview about this
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Si ma mémoire est bonne [If my memory serves me well]
Performance, 16 min
2016
I tell a story about unknown or forgotten works of well-known artists. The transmission of these stories, heard here and there, ensures the survival of these works that could disappear if they were not told, discussed, shared.
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L'Exposition dans ma tête [The Exhibition inside my head]Performance, 20 min
2014
Can artworks exist or ‘‘occur’’ inside my head? I make a selection of seventeen works of contemporary artists (from Robert Barry and Lawrence Weiner to Tino Sehgal). They are divided into four sections: those playing with the concept of work of art, those playing on the link between the work and its appearance space, those related to the relationship between the work and the viewer, and nally those playing with the link between the work and its artist.
The exhibition installation lasts about a month, the time to set everything in my head. On November 13 I make a public presentation to an auditorium in Montreal. The exhibition is open. The tour then consists of the presentation, and it’s a quick tour as it lasts fteen minutes. But everyone can come and talk with me and rediscover the works of this exhibition through discussion.
The exhibition will run as long as I remember it.
This is to question the relationship between a work or group of works and a spectator. While preparing this exhibition I met Lawrence Weiner who talked about what it means ‘to own a piece of art.’ Finally don’t we more have a work when we know it - we carry in ourselves - rather than when we buy it?
So I think I offered access to these seventeen artworks to dozens of spectators, now carry it in them - as long as they remember it.
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11.192Performance, 5 h 45
2014
Sitting on a bench, I count out loud as far as I can.
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Une semaine dans une cimaise [One week in an exhibition wall]
Performance, 168 h
2013
I live one week in an exhibition wall without going out.
Ici c'était les Enfers [Here it was Hell]
Performance, 10 min
2023
On the occasion of the studios opening of the Ateliers des Arques residency, I repeat the story of a society that has burned its eyes by trying to see forgotten art forms in the dark.
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Pourquoi dormir plutôt qu'écrire ? [Why sleep in place of writing?]
Performance, 12 h
2023
I invite ten people from the public to come and spend a night with me at the Château-musée du Cayla. We spend the night writing a text that we print at dawn to slip into my exhibition Dans le corps du texte. It is about a fugitive who escaped the binary regime. Also, it is an opportunity for us to discover what words come to us at night, which we might not have encounter in broad daylight.
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Un moment fractal [A fractal instant]
Screen printing, mirror, 146x90 cm each
2023
To read the text of this giant page, you have to turn around and find the text in its reflection. It is about lines of life that sometimes go in opposite directions and yet intersect, right here.
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Commencer par la fin [Starting with the end]
Twelve digital printings on Nautilus 250g, 29,7x21 cm each
2023
At the entrance to the exhibition Dans le corps du texte [In the body of the text], I present twelve pages, with the last words of the twelve books that Virginie Despentes has published, from Baise-moi to Cher connard. Always, these words slam and stir my interiors up.
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Dans le corps du texte [In the body of the text]
Three printings on dilite, 85x52 cm each
2023
This triptych presents the first chapter of my text Dans le corps du texte [In the body of the text]. It features the words of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, among others. It is precisely a question of writing. Who we are when we write. From where we're talking from. From the company we make our own in the text.
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Dix objets dans le miroir [Ten Objects in the Mirror]
Performance, 30 min
2022
I tell 10 pieces made over the past 10 years, from my work as a student to today. Through the story, I try to take the audience with me on a journey through time. Between oral narrative and rewriting, I bring to life past moments which, perhaps, are closer to us than we imagine.
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À perte de vue [Out of sight]
HD video, color, sound, 30 min
2022
In an article published in 1970, art historian Lucy R. Lippard recounts an arctic expedition organized with a group of artists in the extreme northwest of Canada. I go there hoping to find the impossible traces of ephemeral and invisible works and discover a most complex geographical and social situation, where one seems to see only what they decide to see.
This project was selected by the Patronage Commission of the Fondation des Artistes.
Video link
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Planet Earth. Chapter 2 - Language!performance, 45 min
2021
I recount my memory of the second chapter of a book that I read, although it was never published. Two characters, Ol and Al, visit an exhibition which could also be a pun.
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Planet Earth. Chapter 1 - Casa della memoriaperformance, 37 min
2021
I recount my memory of the first chapter of a book that I read, although it was never published. Between travelogue and science fiction, we discover that other senses inhabit us, in addition to the five well-known ones. But to find them isn't easy. They await us and are delivered through various works of art, mystical objects if there are any, exhibited all around the world. Here, the character, Ol, travels between Oaxaca, Venice, Roma and Paris, to understand what happens to them while they had a vision during a nap in Mexico.
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Alors je redeviens plusieurs [So I become mutiple again]
Performance, 6 min
Charcoal on paper, 15 sheets, 29.7 x 21 cm each
2020
I draw the exact limit between the world and I.
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Untitled (To the man in the mirror)
Performance, 25 min
2019
You have conceived the most beautiful works ever. From your clocks that go in pairs to your candies as portraits, you made me crazy. And there is this work, so powerful that it can make its audience fall in love, for real. When I think about it, I dream of myself, coming to activate it, dancing on it in sexy mini shorts. I fantasize of stepping on it in rhythm and silence. So tonight is my night. And if I'm not exactly on stage, not yet, at least I'm standing close in front of it and who knows, maybe tomorrow…
Video link
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Toujours à la recherche [Still in search of]
HD videos, color, sound, 10 min
2019
Back in Mojave Desert for the fourth year in a row, still in search of the place of Robert Barry's work, I share my memories and discoveries, almost live, by posting videos on a daily basis on my Intagram profile.
Video link
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I call it a museumPerformance, 15 min
2019
Through the speech, I describe the topography of an imaginary museum built without any door and from which we can’t exit. Then I seek to think of another way out, inventing new passages through the works and furniture.
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En passant par le labyrinthe [Going through the labyrinth]
Three HD videos, color, sound, 12 min
Image : Ophélie Demurger
2018
I present you the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel's labyrinth through its story. I tell you about us, getting lost in its corridors. I wonder if you exist.
Video link
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Tout ce que je peux en dire [All I can say]
Performance, 26 min
2018
Through the stories of past and future journeys, and between the lines, I visit the exhibition of the Talk Show Festival, in the present.
Production La Panacée - MoCo
Image: Champ contrechamp
Video link
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Open Cube
Installation, wood, screw, fabric, acrylic painting, 2,80 x 2,40 x 3,80 m
2018
On a wooden cube actually open, I reproduce in volume the image of the Open Cube, borrowed from the work of Sol LeWitt.
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A kind of tree
Performance, 30 min
2018
I consider seriously the story telling that Joseph Beuys planted a last tree in the days before his death, thus achieving a final work, whose place remain unknown. Then in a form of narrative close to the logical demonstration, I tell the story of my investigation and orally develop the method to use to find an invisible object in an unknown place. By seeing other works on our way, we end up approaching the tree.
Performed as part of the exhibition Imaginary Display(s) - Exhibition as Film / Film as Exhibition at BNKR Munich, curated by Marie-France Rafael.
Photo: Marie-France Rafael.
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D'autres voix que la mienne [Other voices than mine]
Long term performance
2017
Every day of the exhibition, I invite visitors to tell me stories of works of art. Once registered, I retranscribe them in writing and add them to the exhibition, on the table, available to the following visitors.
La BF15 exhibition and production, 2017
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Deux gravures [Two engravings]
Set of engraved and enamelled ceramics
Turned by Jean-Jacques Dubernard
2017
While I was going to spend two months at Moly-Sabata, an artists residency founded by Albert Gleizes in 1917 and having a rich history of ceramics, I received as a gift two engravings signed by the cubist painter. But they did not appear in his catalog raisonné. I had to do some research before I learned who really was the author. I found it logical to engrave the story of this discovery on a set of ceramics turned in the studio historically related to Moly.
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Être et avoir été [To be and to have been]Sound installation
2017
I make a list of works of art depending only on the visitors at the moment they listen, as ‘The last work of art you saw’. So the series of thirty sentences names work of art that will vary from one person to another, and from one day to another for the same person.
Video link
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À la recherche [In search of]
HD video, color, mute, 23 min
2017
Following the only available geographical information, I go “North of San Bernadino, in the Mojave desert”, in search of the precise location of the work of art Inert Gas Series de Robert Barry. A two weeks journey through the desert, trying to recognize the surrounding moutains, after the picture of the work.
Video link
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Sans titre [Untitled]
Performance, 10 min
2016
In an empty room and trhough speech only, I bring the visitors in my last trip, so we nd ourselves in the desert and everyone sees well the surrounding scenery. This is about six elements I found in the desert, all invisible and however really present.
Video linkn
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Du futur au passé [From Future to Past]
Performance, 45 min
2016
The day of my MFA Exhibition performance, I talk not only about my works from the last ve years in the school, but also about my works to come in the next ve years, outside the school.
They have "already happened in 2019".
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La Poursuite [The Chase]
Performance, video, 8 min
Image : Armèle Portelli
2015
I run and hide in the exhibition Rideaux/blinds at the Institut d’Art Contemporain in Villeurbanne, while it is closed, amongst the works. The camerawoman follows me, giving the sound of her steps and her breath to the camera, up to catching me.
Video link
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Cette photo là est incroyable [This picture here is incredible]
Performance, 30 min
2014
The day of my graduation, I chose to show nothing tangible, but I present three years of my work in a guided tour in empty rooms. First I describe precisely the images that ‘‘are’’ on the wall (while the walls are left white), and when the jury knows the image (when it exists indeed in the mental space of my listeners) we talk as if it was there. For half an hour, my pieces appear in the eyes of the jury, one by one. Also, to avoid saturating the space, the access of other visitors to my space is one by one, strollers become witnesses who all together experiencing the course of my degree and can tell it.
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Une ou deux lignes de plus [One or two more lines]Immaterial
2014
The work only exists because it is announced on the works list.
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Mes sculptures invisibles [My invisible sculptures]
Installation, performance, 2 h 30
2013
Two exhibition guards ask visitors not to walk on my five invisible sculptures, in the space.