Silent Faces — 22,48 m² Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 10 → March 8, 2014

A thought that never changes
Remains a stupid lie
It’s always been just the same
No hearing, nor breathing
No movement, no calling
Just silence.

New Order — Your Silent Face (Power, Corruption & Lies, 1983)

Since birth until our last days we carefully arrange, store, classify or conceal the traces of our lives. Vain, yet vital, these personal and intimate archives reveal our own history: diaries, photographs, letters, postcards, fetish objects, books. These are documents that fill albums and boxes, hard drives and CD-ROMS, and we absolutely need to preserve and save them, as they’ll be the only ones to bear witness to our history, conferring substance and a tangible reality to our memories.

Many artists work with archives. They may be related to their own lives, to their families, to strangers, or to the lives that are ours. To prevent them from outright disappearance, they aim to give them visibility. It’s than a matter of opening books and boxes, screens and archival storage devices in order to run them through the filter of art and show them in a new light. Through paintings, cut-outs, drawings and sculptures, the artists proceed to an actual translation of images and words. Thanks to them, we get to see a photograph of a group of Italian soldiers, postcards written during World War I, anonymous photographs found at a market in Beirut, a box of black and white photographs collected by someone’s aunt, pictures gathered from archival collections, from the internet, or from history books. These documents have each gone through a process of appropriation that offers them a new history and a new destiny.

The process of appropriation allows for the introduction, not only of a degree of distance towards the material, but also of a critical and revealing dimension. Giulia Andreani, Morgane Denzler, Sandra Lorenzi, Leopoldo Mazzoleni and Erwan Venn take part in the construction, or reconstruction, of narratives that are linked to a personal and/or collective history. While some are looking for a truth or a new understanding of a specific story, others use images and texts to generate new narratives.