La Fugitive — Le Crédac, Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 18 → December 18, 2022

La Fugitive — Le Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine Le Crédac présente une exposition collective qui explore les potentielles figures d’Albertine, l’amante disparue d’A la recherche d... 2 - Bien Critique

Albertine appears for the first time on the beach at Balbec, in the middle of a group of athletic and impudent jeunes filles en fleur (young girls in flower). Starting with this second volume of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, also translated as Remembrance of Things Past), Albertine becomes the novel’s most referenced character. An object of the narrator’s passion, covetousness and jealousy, Albertine is a strong and self- assured women, yet she remains elusive, her character always slipping out of our grasp.

She has few spoken lines in this narrative, yet remains the subject and master of her actions.

Throughout this and the subsequent volumes, she sows confusion about her motivations and personality rather than enlightening the narrator and readers. Ultimately, her character is as secret as it is complex.

As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear that Albertine loves women and this sensuality that she constantly reveals comes to obsess the narrator.

Many artists, in their practice, address the questions raised by the figure of Albertine in À la recherche du temps perdu and by her treatment at the hands of literary critics who refuse to see her as anything but the fictional embodiment of real-world male characters in Proust’s life. Challenging a visual culture inherited from the male gaze, rejecting the immutability of forms and foregrounding queer people, these artistic interrogations advance a perhaps more complex and polysemic way to see things and the world.

The exhibition La Fugitive seeks to reembody Albertine through twenty emblematic works by contemporary artists and pieces produced specially for this exhibition. They constitute a journey from the young girl’s domestic space to the both real and fantasized milieux that in this book slip away from the narrator’s inquisitorial and voyeuristic gaze.

Group show organized by Ana Mendoza Aldana in collaboration with Claire Le Restif.

Show coproduced with the Festival d’Automne à Paris.