Sunday, March 22, 2009

Centre d'art de Fribourg- Kunsthalle Freiburg



"Lapses" is an accumulation of fragments of a whole piece that is irremediably not on view, calling on a mental mode of image production, always encouraging us to consider the absences, the possibility of disappearance as well as appearance. The missing and yet crucial object would be the cinema format for its perfect, complete, finished quality, maybe too because the cinema is also the "art of bringing back ghosts"* and with various spectres providing the internal linkage in this exhibition.

Photographs of nameless people, family snaps made to work together in a subjective way by Céline Duval, focus on the very notion of forgetting and at the same time on the scenes we are given to see. Although its form almost is systematically diverted from completeness, the film is central to the work of Gabriel Lester: like the installations, the filmed sequences leave the viewer with the indeterminacy of stage-sets in a state of suspension and films cut into pieces. The works of Marcelline Delbecq lay the emphasis on writing; the text is written or carried by the voice, which is the organ of the invisible 
par excellence — whether her own or someone else's (Kim Gordon, Elina Löwensohn) —shaping sequences in which there is a precise balance between what is revealed and what is kept secret. The literary formper se involves this tension, this balance, and this show is regularly populated by literary figures; taking the form of an evocation in the fragmentary installations of Dagmar Heppner, literature can become a medium in those of David Hominal. The subtle use of disappearances and appearances fosters a suspended awareness, the projection of the imaginary onto the invisible.
*Jacques Derrida in 
Ghost Dance, a Ken McMullen film, 1983

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