Louis-Cyprien Rials, avec Ramon Film Productions — Palais de Tokyo — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: February 20 → May 12, 2019

The Middle East, unrecognised countries, radioactive or forbidden zones seen as “unintentional natural parks” are all territories that Louis-Cyprien Rials has explored or inhabited. From these zones marked by violence or whipped up by great conflicts, the artist delivers a silent, sometimes mystical image, using video and photography. His moving pictures made up of still shots, which are often long and devoid of human presence, talk of the impossibility to grasp such abandoned, transformed spaces, filled with beliefs and run through with stigmata.

Louis-Cyprien Rials is presenting at the Palais de Tokyo a film and a series of objects made with Ramon Film Productions. This production company, set up by Isaac Nabwana I.G.G., brings together Ugandans from various origins in a studio not far from the Wakaliga road, in a ghetto in the suburbs of Kampala, the capital of Uganda. Together, they have been writing and producing successful, low-budget films for over ten years. Their feature-length movies are inspired from Chinese Kungfu films and convey the violence of American action movies.

With Louis-Cyprien Rials, they produce an adaptation of Rashomon (1950) by the famous Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. The result is hybrid: it mingles filmic and cultural references, while leaving open the reality of Ugandan ghettos while, via a fiction, narrating how viewpoints and truths can be varied.

Curator: Adélaïde Blanc

_Born in 1981 in Paris, Louis-Cyprien Rials discovered photography in Japan, where he was based for several years. He then moved to Paris, Brussels and Berlin, while also undertaking long stays in conflict zones and areas forbidden to the public. After the beginning of the 2000s, he has used photography and video in the attempt to grasp and narrate the violence underlying these territories.

Louis-Cyprien Rials has presented his work in several group exhibitions as well as solo shows, in particular in Hestia (Belgrade, 2018), the Dohyang Lee Gallery (Paris, 2016) and IDK Contemporary (Brussels, 2014).

In spring 2019, he will put on two exhibitions : “Par la fenêtre brisée” (Through the Broken Window) at Eric Mouchet gallery (Paris) and “Au pied du gouffre” (At the Foot of the Abyss) at Dohyang Lee gallery (Paris). With “Au bord de la route de Wakaliga” (On the Wakaliga Roadside) at the Palais de Tokyo, these exhibitions as presented simultaneously in Paris will form a trilogy._