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.
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.
