Fourrure, vitrine, photographie — Une exposition de Gilles Saussier et Stéphanie Solinas — CPIF — Centre photographique d’Ile-de-France — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 13 → May 29, 2016

In 2015-2016, the CPIF and FRAC Haute-Normandie joined forces to organise a retrospective devoted to Gilles Saussier. For the second part of this exhibition at the CPIF, Gilles Saussier has invited Stéphanie Solinas to take part in a dialogue around identity and how photography both constructs and deconstructs this notion.

When you compare extracts from their major photographic and publishing projects — Sans titre. M. Bertillon, Déserteurs and Dominique Lambert for Stéphanie Solinas; Le Tableau de Chasse, Spolia and Studio Shakhari Bazar for Gilles Saussier — it is obvious that both of these photographers broach the question of identity. For them identity is not a given asset, not something that has been interiorised, or whose permanence is ensured by photography. Identity is seen as a process open to otherness in which each person reinvents and reconstructs themselves to become multiple and infinitely mobile.

This external rather than internal form of identity is developed in a joint work, an autobiographical and photographic ‘exquisite corpse’ entitled Fourrure, vitrine, photographie, created specifically for this exhibition by Stéphanie Solinas and Gilles Saussier.

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Gilles Saussier follows an experimental documentary approach in which the photos do not freeze the gestures and narrative of history, but on the contrary challenge the way images are often used to provide a stable definition of memory. In his practice, the photographic act is a performance, at the crossroads of the documentary genre, minimalism and anthropology.

Stéphanie Solinas produces a diverse (images, books, installations), and fundamentally photographic body of work that tirelessly questions the medium itself. Using various devices, her practice considers notions of self and the Other by using images to explore those invisible realities — identity, memory and thought — which are at work in the very act of ‘seeing’.