Ismaïl Bahri — Instruments — Jeu de Paume, Concorde — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 13 → September 24, 2017

Ismaïl Bahri — Jeu de Paume Le Jeu de Paume accueille jusqu'au 24 septembre _Instruments,_ une exposition personnelle d'Ismaïl Bahri, qui offre une plongée maîtrisée dans un monde où le temps s'affirme dans toutes ses dimensions.

The Jeu de Paume opens its doors to Ismaïl Bahri for his first major exhibition. Born in Tunis in 1978, the artist lives and works between Paris and Tunis. He works mainly with video although he continues to make drawings, photographs and installations. Ismaïl Bahri’s work is often produced from a series of operations featuring basic elements of everyday life, with the action stemming from the interaction between them: a drop of water, for example, placed on someone’s skin and reacting to arterial pulsations; a thread being wound in; or the fibres in a sheet of paper becoming permeated with ink. With his attentive eye, his sense of detail and his taste for the enigmatic, the artist creates micro-events while at the same time questioning the conditions for their visibility.

“Instruments”, the exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, presents a selection of his principal works along with two new works, conceived and produced for the occasion. This set of eight video works reflects the main themes running through his œuvre; such themes as fundamentals, duration, scale, and transformation, but also visibility and invisibility, mystery and solving the mystery. The exhibition seeks to develop a movement of progressive enlargement, starting with the intimate and leading outwards to landscape, light and a certain sort of abstraction.

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Ismaïl Bahri has been the subject of a number of one-man shows: in 2014 at Les Églises de Chelles — Centre d’art contemporain, and the Espace Khiasma, Les Lilas, Paris. He has also featured regularly in group exhibitions. In 2016, his work was presented in Incorporated! at the Ateliers de Rennes — Biennale d’art contemporain, and in the exhibition “Uprisings”, at the Jeu de Paume. His videos have also been screened at numerous film festivals such as the FIDMarseille, the TIFF Toronto Film Festival and the NYFF New York Film Festival. In 2017, he will be taking part in the Sharjah Biennale and the IFFR Rotterdam International Film Festival.