Beyond the Shadows
Elsa & Johanna
Beyond the Shadows is anchored in the continuity of our research on the mise-en-scene, self-fiction, identity and cinema. Made in Calgary, west Canadian, this new series of self-portraits invokes the intimacy of everyday, banal scenes, as extracted from films. It's also the journey and the time that are played out in Beyond the Shadows, the passage from one story to another, the furtive opening on extracts from life, where our two faces have the effect of patterns, which are reproduced in photographs, as if to remind us that lies and fiction can also tell us some form of truth.
Johanna Benaïnous was born in 1991 in Paris and Elsa Parra was born in 1990 in Bayonne. They currently live and work in Paris. In 2014, while Johanna studies at Les Beaux-arts de Paris in Eric Poitevin's studio and Elsa studies at Les Arts Décoratifs de Paris, they met in New-York during a common exchange program at the School of Visual Art. Afterwards they got their Master degree with first class honours in 2015.
Since they first met in United States, Elsa and Johanna have been working together as a duo of artists photographers and directors. They were invited at 61th Salon de Montrouge in 2016, finalists for the prize 'HSBC pour la photographie 2016', nominated the same year for 'Révélations Emerige 2016' and invited at Festival Circulation(s) 2017 and Festival Photo Saint-Germain 2017. They won the 2nd prize of 'Prix Picto de la mode 2017'. In 2018, their piece A Couple of Them enters the collection of the FMAC. Elsa & Johanna recently won the Public Prize at the 2019 Hyères Festival in the photo section.