Sabine Massenet — Image Trouvée — Espace Khiasma — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: February 10 → March 24, 2011

It all begins by a simple card with the inscription “If you find this picture please write to the following address…” It’s not a financial scam or a contest, more an invitation. Sabine Massenet distributes her enigmatic messages the way others send bottles out to sea. Slipped randomly into the books of a dozen libraries in Seine-Saint-Denis, these bizarre little cards, illustrated by a no less strange photograph — in a Hitchcockian black and white, hands open a mysterious message — are the starting point of a long adventure to meet the anonymous readers of northwestern Paris.

For almost two years the artist corresponded with men and women of all ages, each of whom cultivates a particular relationship with books. What do they read? Why do they read? Where do they read? From childhood emerge memories of the first books, the obsessive ones, the forbidden… Reading becomes refuge, revelation, anger or escape from the constraints of material life and the passage of time. Some readers accepted to meet the artist, nearly twenty were filmed. And yet, Image Trouvée is not a documentary film, but a hybrid object where Massenet stages the site of an encounter using a sumptuous composition of shots that glide one into the other. A series of “portraits with books” that also explores hidden places, far from the clichés that usually define the image of the “93” department.

A confirmed video artist, Sabine Massenet opens a new chapter in her work with this installation and its multiple projections, more vast, more ample than ever before. A collection of encounters, objects and words that together invent an art of impressionist narrative. Divided into three chapters (each chapter containing six portraits), the exhibit offers as many rendezvous. An unfolding tale that reveals the world of reading, moving from gravity to laughter, from concrete to orchards.