Les Modules / Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent — Olwen Gaucher — Palais de Tokyo — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 8 → June 5, 2011

Port areas, mobile buildings, insularity, and phenomenology appear like an undercurrent in the sculptural and video practice of Olwen Gaucher. His works are revealed as so many elements constituting a “non-place zone” enabling him both to question a world in movement — governed by displacements — and take account of reality through the imprint made by objects.

Filmed in Super-8, a format that endows it with a documentary and fragile look, Insurrection d’un songe consists of an extremely simple action: the plastic elements of the ghostly structure of a submarine are taken out of a container, assembled outside it, folded up and then put away in the same receptacle. A recurrent element in Olwen Gaucher’s visual vocabulary, the container is regarded here as a symbol of the standardization and transport of goods. Inspired by the Fish Story project of the American artist Allan Sekula, Insurrection d’un songe deals with the myth of “a worker’s republic of the seven seas, a vast informal syndicalist conspiracy of toilers on ships, docks, and fishing boats (…), a proletarian version of Captain Nemo and his submarine crew of outcast revolutionaries.”¹

¹ Allan Sekula, “Live Cinders”, in Fish Story, Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag,1995, p. 183