The artists nominated by
Léonie Pondevie's photographic form is composite, arranged by the aggregation of clues: contemporary shots, collected archive images and shared personal documents sit side by side like evidence of an ongoing investigation into complex and evolving realities. In Un point bleu pâle, she follows in her meteorologist father's footsteps and contemplates the clouds, assembling everything from particle images to archival documents and new photographs.
If Hélène Bellenger's work could be associated with a single tool, it would not be a camera, but rather a fine, precise instrument of the forensic scientist, so diligent is the artist in dissecting the workings of an imagery of perfect beauty and its artificial paradises. Most recently, she uses the images of Apollo torsos and Venus busts to continues her archaeology of the canons of beauty.
Photographic investigation became, by force of circumstance, the form that Rebecca Topakian adopted. In 2021, she set out to tell the personal story of her Armenian family, exiled from Turkey as a result of persecution. In the project Il faut que les braises de Constantinople s'envolent jusqu'en Europe, the artist continues recording, assembling and maintaining the embers of memory through photographs and text.
Rebekka Deubner's work is full of narratives of metamorphosis. From intimate exploration of the body and its movements in her early work, Deubner later moved on to exploring the body as political territory, with Les saisons thermiques - an ensemble dedicated to male contraception. Here, we find her slowly approaching the body and restoring its tender plasticity, an alternative representation of masculinity embodied.
Léonie Pondevie's photographic form is composite, arranged by the aggregation of clues: contemporary shots, collected archive images and shared personal documents sit side by side like evidence of an ongoing investigation into complex and evolving realities. In Un point bleu pâle, she follows in her meteorologist father's footsteps and contemplates the clouds, assembling everything from particle images to archival documents and new photographs.
If Hélène Bellenger's work could be associated with a single tool, it would not be a camera, but rather a fine, precise instrument of the forensic scientist, so diligent is the artist in dissecting the workings of an imagery of perfect beauty and its artificial paradises. Most recently, she uses the images of Apollo torsos and Venus busts to continues her archaeology of the canons of beauty.
Photographic investigation became, by force of circumstance, the form that Rebecca Topakian adopted. In 2021, she set out to tell the personal story of her Armenian family, exiled from Turkey as a result of persecution. In the project Il faut que les braises de Constantinople s'envolent jusqu'en Europe, the artist continues recording, assembling and maintaining the embers of memory through photographs and text.
Rebekka Deubner's work is full of narratives of metamorphosis. From intimate exploration of the body and its movements in her early work, Deubner later moved on to exploring the body as political territory, with Les saisons thermiques - an ensemble dedicated to male contraception. Here, we find her slowly approaching the body and restoring its tender plasticity, an alternative representation of masculinity embodied.
If Hélène Bellenger's work could be associated with a single tool, it would not be a camera, but one of those fine, precise instruments of the forensic scientist, so diligent is the artist in dissecting the workings of an imagery of perfect beauty and its artificial paradises. Preferring the act of collecting and transforming to that of shooting, she approaches images that are inert and out of use. For the Dazzled project, she collected a series of faces on the internet that had been obliterated by a flash of light - the now famous form of the selfie with the flash in the mirror - forming a kind of digital sun that contaminates the image and prevents the portrait. Another collection is that of advertisements for anxiolytics and antidepressants taken from specialist magazines, which she assembles into a frieze to display the litany of tense faces and slogans in the form of injunctions to happiness. Earlier, in Right color, she diverted a collection of magazines, posters and photograms from reels of films featuring actresses from the 1920s to the 1950s, reviving the make-up that was applied to them to reconstruct their faces and modify their plasticity for the black-and-white screen of the time. With her recent Bianco ordinario, her torsos of Apollo and busts of Venus, she continues her archaeology of the canons of beauty. Through a play of superimposed forms and supports, she links the geological time of the Carrara marble quarries, its extraction in Antiquity for sculpture, and today's massive extraction of marble powder to whiten the packaging of our cosmetics and cleaning products. The ensemble consists of a collection of unfolded packaging cartons on which the artist prints images of antique busts and quarry landscapes. In turn, the images themselves will be extracted from their support by the acidity of the marble powder contained in the cardboard, washing them ‘whiter than white’. The history and fortunes of the Western concept of whiteness are at the heart of the work the artist is currently developing in the Mediterranean basin.Hélène Bellenger (1989) lives and works between Marseille and Paris. After studying law and art history, she specialised in photography and graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d'Arles in 2016. Bianco Ordinario was supported by Aide à la Création 2021 from the Drac PACA and produced at the Centre Photographique Ile-de-France as part of the 2022-2023 research and post-production residency.The artist would like to thank Isabelle Carta, Roland Carta, Centre Photographique d'Ile-de-France, Nathalie Giraudeau, galerie Marguerite Milin and Francesco Bi
Léonie Pondevie's photographic form is composite, arranged by the aggregation of clues: contemporary shots, collected archive images and shared personal documents sit side by side on the wall like evidence of an ongoing investigation into complex and evolving realities. In Un point bleu pâle, Léonie Pondevie contemplates the sky and observes the weather. In the same way that her father would obsessively record rainfall levels and temperatures in small notebooks, she assembles particle images, waiting to be analysed. She subjects these images to a kind of poetic decantation: her father's notebooks and his measurements from another age, archive images of the village where he was born, press cuttings from the 1970s, the clouds in front of us at sea, a hand caressing an antediluvian granite and raindrops on the hood of a relative. The stratospheric and the extremely close, immensity and intimacy, impassive geological time and climatic urgency, it's all there, under the same sky. Placing her observation post at the heart of her family history, Léonie Pondevie eludes the Manichean demonstration: the photographic project, though wide-ranging, does not claim to elucidate anything, but sets itself up as a humble hypothesis. What Un point bleu pâle portrays is the act of human experience; not the thing, the climate, but the ways in which we take it into consideration, from the observer who guesses at its insignificance and modestly records the life of the clouds in little notebooks to the way they are boxed up by geo-engineers, neo-demiurges. From these decanted images, the reflection of a distant land, with which we have lost contact, rises. The simultaneous and paradoxical measure of our insignificance and ourpower to cause harm.
Léonie Pondevie (1996) graduated from the École européenne supérieure d'art de Bretagne in Lorient in 2020. She is a member of the Collectif Nouveau Document and is based in Lorient.
