Slash Universe — Dana Michel & Yoan Sorin — CAC Brétigny — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 13 → December 15, 2019

Dana Michel et Yoan Sorin — CAC Brétigny Le Cac Brétigny présente jusqu'au 15 décembre l'exposition Slash Universe, une collaboration entre deux artistes dont les routes se croisent depuis plusieurs années et qui dessinent pour la première fois un projet commun.

From a proposal by Marie Bechetoille

Scenography: Romain Guillet

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Dana Michel and Yoan Sorin met about a dozen years ago in Montreal. It was the beginning of a deep connection based on art and friendship. Both have taken indirect paths to get to where they are today, practicing sports at an advanced level, for instance, while bonding over numerous references. In performance they have found a way of feeling, sparking, and sharing emotions by bringing in their own lived experiences. In her shows, the choreographer Dana Michel is able to summon on stage multiple identities that embody the relationship between fragility and violence, vulnerability and self-mockery, the grotesque and the sublime. Depending on the context, Yoan Sorin mixes and appropriates for his own ends artistic and cultural codes through drawing, installation, painting, and performance. His role as an art advisor for Dana Michel is a way for both of them to keep in touch and continue their discussion. Their family backgrounds link both to the Caribbean and they readily lay claim to a creolization by creating cartography that is eclectic, polysemic, and indistinct, one that resists being defined or pinned down. The presence of autobiographic elements is a chance to elude projections and deploy possibilities. The body sets in motion personal stories and daily gestures to speak about the margins, the issues that power raises, and connections with others. By their reversal of established hierarchies, the odd and the intimate are united.

At CAC Brétigny, Dana Michel and Yoan Sorin have been invited for the first time to work together with and on the things they have been thinking about and hungering after, their reflections and their dreams, in the form of a joint exhibition, offering assemblages, visits, and breaks from reality. Thanks to the designer Romain Guillet, the art center’s space has been reimagined as a place for experimentation, something that is modular and evolving. At the start, midway through, and at the end of this project, performances will reactivate the installation. The works are at one and the same time sculptures, paintings, props, settings, pedestals, and bases. They seem to be hiding behind masks and are rediscovered, looming up transformed. These shifts and evolutions allow each visitor to imagine a subjective intuitive narrative. “Slash Universe” is an environment in which nothing is fixed so that improvisation can thrive. The show speaks of a friendship, an open correspondence between two artists who enjoy producing work together. Gradually a place forms and comes into focus, where one is constantly changing direction, boredom is never a bad experience, and failure is a rebound, where one parries and reappropriates expectation, and everything remains to be invented.