Documents 

Le livre, comme l'exposition, présente la série « Im Wahnzimmer », qui s'inscrit pleinement dans ce registre de la « folie domestique ». Son titre est un jeu de mot sur la « salle à manger », qui se dit wohnzimmer en allemand, et le mot wahn qui veut dire « folie ». À cette oeuvre monumentale s'ajoutent d'autres travaux des Blume, en regard de photographies (issues du fonds de l'IGPP1) prises fin xixe - début du xxe, illustrant des phénomènes paranormaux qui ont insipré les Blume dans leur travail. [résumé de l'éditeur]

The Oldest Living Things in the World is an epic journey through time and space. Over the past decade, artist Rachel Sussman has researched, worked with biologists, and traveled the world to photograph continuously living organisms that are 2,000 years old and older. Spanning from Antarctica to Greenland, the Mojave Desert to the Australian Outback, the result is a stunning and unique visual collection of ancient organisms unlike anything that has been created in the arts or sciences before, insightfully and accessibly narrated by Sussman along the way.

Her work is both timeless and timely, and spans disciplines, continents, and millennia. It is underscored by an innate environmentalism and driven by Sussman’s relentless curiosity. She begins at “year zero,” and looks back from there, photographing the past in the present. These ancient individuals live on every continent and range from Greenlandic lichens that grow only one centimeter a century, to unique desert shrubs in Africa and South America, a predatory fungus in Oregon, Caribbean brain coral, to an 80,000-year-old colony of aspen in Utah. Sussman journeyed to Antarctica to photograph 5,500-year-old moss; Australia for stromatolites, primeval organisms tied to the oxygenation of the planet and the beginnings of life on Earth; and to Tasmania to capture a 43,600-year-old self-propagating shrub that’s the last individual of its kind. Her portraits reveal the living history of our planet—and what we stand to lose in the future. These ancient survivors have weathered millennia in some of the world’s most extreme environments, yet climate change and human encroachment have put many of them in danger. Two of her subjects have already met with untimely deaths by human hands.

Dominique Rey is a photographer, painter, and performance artist whose work is marked by a fascination with the marginal figure. This publication documents two new series, one photographic and the other pictoral. In Erlking, Rey takes on a host of personas linked to the German and Scandinavian mythical creature that lures foolish travelers to their death. Drawing from psychoanalysis and the literay works of Angela Carter, Rey invokes personas in flux. Her painting series Pilgrims shows the influence of her involvement as a performer and attests to the intimate knowledge and experience she invests in her work. Recalling sideshow circus ‘freaks’ and 1950s burlesque, Pilgrims, explores notions of the ‘unbeautiful’ and how the unbeautiful becomes permissible, and even desirable, under the guise of performance and public display. Alterity is a central facet of Rey’s practice. She chooses not to simply document, but to immerse herself within these peripheral cultures.

Risk Colour Book is the result of an encounter between two bodies of work, both involved with the concept of risk. Whether we are dealing with an inventory of toxic pigments and their possible secondary effects or with a performance recreating the moment when a pedestrian is struck by a car, Gustavo Artigas explores the various possible kinds of risk, disasters and accidents. Through recording, repetition and the staging of action, Artigas exposes the fragility of the body, subjected to a cunningly latent violence. [editor summary]