Mousaï / Muses — Dohyang Lee Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: February 6 → April 30, 2016

Nine sisters… each of them received a present they will donate to the whole humanity… Eloquence, history, lyric poetry, music, tragedy, rhetoric, dance, comedy, astronomy. Such gifts are blessings for us, human beings, who try to explain our existence, to brighten it up, to share experiences or simply leave a track. The exhibition Mousaï / Muses invites six artists with literature and the time that goes by as a basis. References to art history for Charlotte Siedel, Jihee Kim, with her bold and unexpected associations which make her inspiration free, the lyricism we feel when reading Sara Acremann’s letter on a personal event, the scenario of the life’s ordinary condition with Rohwajeong, the subtle and intellectual reflection upon the language and the verb by Elisabeth S. Clark and finally the three ceramic bowls containing rhythmic incantations for curses or blessings of Louis-Cyprien Rials, illustrate various aspects of the gifts that human beings possess, and express through literature.

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Charlotte Seidel, born in 1981 in Hamburg, is a German and French artist, who lives and works in Paris. She presents works having relationship with the art history. « … » is a book edited by the artist on the added passages and the modifications of the text made by E.H. Gombrich in his Story of Art since the first edition (1950 ) until the sixteenth (2012 ). These passages are surrounded by the blank space of a never-ending story. She suggests that art history, could be a living matter, and the perception of a same event changes according to eras. Square Dance and still, are the retranscription of some texts from the Theory of Colours by Johan Wolfgang Goethe. The works speak of absences, transparencies, presences, light refraction, and effects the observation of colours produces upon the human sight. For instance, complementary colours would appear inside the «internal» eye after a while observing a coloured surface.

Charlotte Seidel, …, 2012 — 2016, 0 Livre — 25 × 18,5 × 4,5 cm Photo © Aurélien Mole

Jihee Kim, born in 1983, in Seoul, graduated from the Goldsmith School of London in 2013. She is interested in the relationship between «text et image» and she has been exploring her drawings by using books. The books Kim normally use as sketchbooks were donated by cities. This project began when she selected some sentences or words from a book. She creates automatic drawings that spread like dominoes — her thoughts, memories and experiences are the starting point which evokes her imagination. Literature provides her sources she could extract a multitude of ideas from. The question of what she has to draw made unexpected images, like for the works To Dark Eyes, Bruce Lee, My tastes are singular. Black Books, and Don’t touch come from the sensation of the language barrier, she feels in front of English.

Sara Acremann is awarded a Contemporary Literature Bachelor degree and arrived at the National School of Fine Arts of Paris in 2007 then obtains her Master of Arts degree with the congratulations of the jury in 2012. She uses the sound and the textual work, to question the notion of uncertainty -of the author and the spectator, the status of the image and the speech, by building fragile fictions, stories which always lean on observations of the daily reality and spread in the uncertain space of the assumptions. In 2015, she is nominated for the Revelations Emerige Prize and was part of the exhibition Empiristes. Le Mail et le Mur is a artwork that takes back an e-mail sent to someone in November, 2013 and carved in the wall. Here we have a testimony where the central event remains absent, where the characters still speak and tell. Language is always embodied even if it changes its shape. Sara Acremann wishes to bring forward the speech and the act to carve in the wall is bold… Will to make this event last forever ?

Rohwajeong, Das Leben der Anderen (The lives of others), 2009 Vidéo, format 4 : 3, couleur — 3’21’’ Photo © Aurélien Mole

Rohwajeong, formed by Yun-hee Noh (Seoul, 1981) and Hyeon-seok Jeong (Seoul, 1981), is a visual artist duo from Seoul, South Korea. More than a duet, it is a uniqueand inseparable being. They work on human relationships that change through space or the time or on stories of their environment using various mediums. Das Leben Der Anderen (2009) is a video which scenario is realized on the basis of the movie Das Leben Der Anderen (The life of others) and reports the various forms of relationships that make society. This movie deals with the mechanism of large-scale espionage practised by Stasi in East Germany. The video of Rohwajeong speaks of natural conflicts, common understanding which grows with time and illusions of the society that surrounds us everyday. The non-verbal communication in this video represents the conversation between two persons whereas the simplicity of this video invites us to look into our daily lives, like for the first time.

Elisabeth S. Clark, When I buried the Book of Sand, 2009 & When I buried the Book of Sand, 2011, 0 Photo © Aurélien Mole

Elisabeth S. Clark (born in 1983) is an artist working between London and Paris. She explores the topography of language, time, sound and thought. Her works speak of displacement and disappearance — but also of transformation and appearances. She adds, removes, establishes protocols and often refers to literature, music or science. Her work moves freely between disciplines — whether sculpture, installation, performance, gestures. She shows:  _When I buried the Book of Sand…_, from the book by Jorge Luis Borges The Book of Sand, she saw on a journey to Buenos Aires, in 2009. She bought it and took it for three months while travelling around Argentina. In one the most dry regions of the world, the Atacama Desert, she decided to bury the book, remembering the words from the book «the best place to hide a leaf is the forest». Photos and dry transfer are the trace of this action.

After a long time or short time, an artwork being part of the series Words that don’t keep still, strings of words are like negative sculptures, traces of motion, documentation in the present tense, transforming a short sentence into an imaginary picture or recreating an impression of an ephemeral moment. Choon, a word invented by the artist. The word was first spotted in Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt. He used it (spelt it) phonetically to imply the verb to «tune», but with a Dublin accent. However, the artist would argue that it was no mistake that Beckett would choose to specifically (he tunes the verb «to tune»!). While creating this verb, she is interested in its use, the evolution and the modification of the language.

Louis Cyprien Rials, Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin — Bols, 2015 Dimensions variables — Pièces uniques Photo © Aurélien Mole

Louis-Cyprien Rials, born in 1981 in Paris, practises photography and video art. After attending theatre lessons at the conservatory, his aspiration to independent creation ways leaned him to choices that marked his artistic career. In 2005, he left and lived for three years in Tokyo and organised his first exhibition, Koban. Since his return from Japan, he lives between Paris, Brussels and Berlin and continues his researches. In 2010, he went on a first bike journey to entire closed areas, he sees as «unintentional nature parks». In 2012, he finished his first experimental fiction, the impersonal western Nessuno, and keeps involving in the creation of videos between art and meditative documentary, with the projects Holy Wars_, _Dilmun Highway ( Bahrain, 2014 ) and Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin ( Iraq, 2015 ).  Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin — Bols are three ceramics in biscuit, new evolutions of a Sassanian tradition to engrave curses in incantation bowls turned to the ground. Texts, translated with the help of the Collège de France, are written in Judeo — Aramaic on the faces of these objects. One of them is a blessing for the selfless and beneficial man, while the two others promise fire to the persons responsible for wars and contemporary predations. Those ceramics are along with the video Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, where we can see an eternal fire. Rials explains the ceramics are like realised form this fire.