Impasse — Stéphane Thidet et Elika Hedayat — Aline Vidal Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 8 → May 29, 2010

Stéphane Thidet

Stéphane Thidet uses paradoxes such as game and rite lack and doubt, disturbing familiarity, reversal of the temporal data. His second solo show at the gallery articulates his last works by investigating the stake in danger as fields of the possible. The works made for the exhibition suggest thinking of the decline not as a bait of the end, but as an alternative of existence of what surrounds us : congeal, weaken, peel, force things to turn to a new origin, suppose their condition of existence.

Trapped objects, situations of coma imposed on the objects : it proposes a distorted world, and creates a fictional reading of our everyday life.

Each piece of work by Stéphane Thidet, beyond its formal beauty, is a crossroads inducing onlookers into fantasy, doubt, shock. Through the looking-glass avails the mechanics of a trap. Modern myths, his works capture the spectator in contradictory feelings, identical to those that man facing of wolf, his best enemy : fascination, charm, threat.

Once upon a time, there was a man chased by the wind
Ballerina bones dancing on the roadside
A wooden house in which was rain was pouring
A coal heap lighter than a bird’s feather
A swing constricted in glass forbidden to children
Mountains growing in the center of a billiard table
A ghostly dance-floor haunted by memories.

Georgina Tacou, 2009

Third floor : Elika Hedayat

Deeply stricken by everyday life in Iran, Elika Hedayat deals in her work with engaged thematics : censorship’s weight, fear of repression, hardness of women life “This is the climate in which I’ve been living” specifies Elika.

Her artistic approach ensues from a necessity of reinvent herself, of recomposing a new identity who remembers the past. Elika Hedayat explores different ways to confront reality with her own imagination. She sets spectators into a parallel universe, which echoes come to us as familiar.

“To organize my ideas, I always start from interviews, documentaries, meetings and observations of the surrounding world. My work is a free interpretation which leads us into an imaginative or fantastic universe through those authentic documents. I deal with social and human relationships, and also with the question of identity. I use different ways to express myself such as animation, installation, drawing or videos wherein I compose the soundtrack”.

Elika Hedayat leads us to the childhood universe which she proposes such as a little theatre made with accessories full of secret and imaginative stories. Game becomes the antidote of the loss in which emanates nostalgia mixing sadness and joy. Sometimes, she expresses her desire to run away her fears and her quest of a new identity by metaphorical ways : a patch worked construction, a kind of makeshift job, or a failed metamorphose to try to escape from censure, from inexistence and death.