Nuits blanches et chambres noires — Centre culturel canadien — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 26 → October 26, 2012

As part of the Semaine des Cultures Etrangères and Nuit Blanche, the Canadian Cultural Centre presents two exhibitions exploring different types of revelation: Nuits blanches by Calgary artist Derek Besant and Chambres noires by Quebec photographer Michel Campeau.

Derek Besant’s installation Nuits blanches plunges the viewer into a mysterious realm in which floating images — empty motel rooms that look like crime scenes — become surfaces on which fantasies may be projected. Nuits Blanches invites us to experience a particular aspect — more cinematic than photogenic — of the vast Canadian landscape, the never-ending journeys and impersonal service stations along the deserted roads taken to cross the country from east to west. It is a metaphorical and lonely night journey, a road movie that leads us to from one motel room to another, with their unmade beds, silent witnesses to restless nights serving as a frame for the narrative.

Comprising some thirty colour photographs taken between 2005 and 2009, _Chambres noires _is the composite portrait of that endangered place of revelation, the darkroom. Fragments of darkrooms visited in Vietnam, Niger, Mexico, Cuba, Canada, Germany, Belgium and France, the images are both intimate and transnational. Without the slightest hint of nostalgia and without ceding to the temptation of producing a photogenic image of the private place with restricted access shielded from the light, Campeau photographs the artist’s equipment and clutter, the context of his work in which instruments and techniques, as well as the traces of experiments, no longer serve to reveal an image but themselves become the subject of the image. Paradoxically, Chambres noires takes us into the now obsolete secret closed spaces of the photo lab, where images used to be revealed in the dark.