Gaëlle Choisne, L’Ère du Verseau — Prix Duchamp 2024, Centre Pompidou — Point de vue — Slash Paris

Behind its apparent explosiveness, The Age of Aquarius succeeds in combining this ambition of openness to all with an intimate and universally subjective vision of our emotions. A sensitive installation that is as direct as it is ultimately delicate, creating a space-time filled with a poetry of encounters and coincidences, where meticulousness and spontaneity come together within a well-grounded project.

Prix Marcel Duchamp — 2024 @ Centre Georges Pompidou from October 2, 2024 to January 6, 2025. Learn more Drawing on a concept as rich in esoteric symbolism as it is debated in its rational application, The Age of Aquarius embraces a plurality of visions, leaving interpretation open around its symbolism of renewal. As often seen in Gaëlle Choisne’s work, the symbol acts more as a catalyst for the imagination than a guide for thought. The open dialogue her works invoke, drawing from various universes and traditions of thought, is always aimed at forces of liberation, at horizons reconstituted from all differences. To fully embrace the dynamic of the unexpected, to celebrate cultures as they are, resistant to the imposition of a singular mindset.

Paradoxes bloom everywhere. The apparent artificiality thus proves to be the best suited to preserve the natural, with soil meticulously prepared to prevent any toxic emissions, while nature itself is altered, sculpted, and reinvented to express, through matter, these great currents of emotional energy that flow through us, surround us, and confront us. The real is never forgotten, resurfacing in subtle ways, reconstructed through associations that integrate the spectators into the whole. Organic, mineral, and artificial elements coexist side by side, celestial universes and aquatic depths intertwine quietly through discreet signs of a roaring revolution.

By reversing orders, Gaëlle Choisne upends hierarchies staging the swirling virtue of the cosmos and applying it to the world of emotions. Here, signs and motifs dance in a vibrant round, on walls, on pedestals, at our feet, and all around us. Regardless of their value or history, all these “common” objects carry a familiarity that echoes those intimacies revealed through encounters, evoking elements that populate our emotional discoveries, imprinting our memories by stealth.

Coins and jewelry resonate with cigarettes and other accessories, surviving this magmatic grasp of the ground, which serves as both a trap and a case. Horizons tremble, from upside down to right side up, the installation leads us to contemplate, from the ground, the astral vaults. An unexpected reversal in the artist’s practice, who tends to work more with verticality and suspension.

Embracing a more didactic virtue than expected from the esoteric projection of this “Age of Aquarius,” which heralds a great cosmic reversal, the artist here launches what could well be a rational call to shift our focus toward the ground and enrich our imagination and sensitivity in light of its meanders.