Zoom — Projection III — Les Fileuses (The Spinners) — Dohyang Lee Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 28 → February 25, 2017

“ Parcae, announce his fate… ” For this exhibition, we would like to listen to the famous trio from Hippolyte and Aricie ¹. There is a strange chance between the fact to display films from three women artists, and the thready expression that is common to all. However, we will not evoke here nor the ancient goddesses, but the strong originality of each artist and their respective videos. Why not singing Aguas de Março ², while pondering about Clarissa Baumann’s artworks? From the first lyrics, only the stone would remain, but the end of the road would be replaced by the sea or chance. For Minia Biabiany, the drawing does not tell a linear story but shows a back and forth sight like it were a crossing. Would the moving pictures be memories on blackboard? The profusion of colors, the delicacy of the threads in the installation Sisters and the video Breathing by Natalia Villanueva makes us wonder about one question : Are the colorful threads which join toghether a metaphor of the birth of everything, of a common origin, but also we are individualities, as for these threads, with one individual fate?

Clarissa Baumann is an artist born in Rio de Janeiro. She posseses a double cursus as she graduated from the Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro and the National Superior Fine Arts School of Paris. She was also trained in contemporary dance in the Angel Vianna Escola e Faculdade de Dança. Clarissa Baumann is the winner of the Beaux-Arts de Paris Prize and the Adagp Révélation des Arts Plastiques Prize in 2016. Passing in transit between technical drawing, plastic arts and dance, the research of Clarissa Baumann puts a question to the place of the body and daily actions in the middle of a constructivist and functional conception of the world. Taking the shape of a play between short-lived processes and various media that question the limits between visible and invisible, her work builds itself from actions occurring on contexts and already existing relations. The artist proposes a new installation Pli, contrepoids made of a thread that begins from outside the gallery space, then pierces the window and finishes its way wrapped into a street paving stone imported from Rio de Janeiro. The video Architecture pour la mer shows a view of Rio de Janeiro in which a sea line crosses horizontally the frame of a window. While trying to add a perpendicular to that horizon, a sewing thread is unwrapped from the inside of the house, crossing the sinous architecture of Burle Marx, the roads, and the sand until the seafront. In Eloge du hasard, Clarissa Baumann throws three dice on barges that transport clay along the Seine river. This version of a failed Mallarmé activates an action which result will never be summarized : each barge continues its way : the clay could be poured in various points of the city or continue its infinite route to more distant harbours, in China or Mexico…

Minia Biabiany was born in Guadeloupe Island, in 1988. She graduated from the National Superior Fine Arts School of Lyon, in 2011. She lives and works between Paris and Mexico D.F. Her work questions the interlacing between intimacy and politics from the place and the territory. Her installations in situ consider the space as the origin and build poetics of the place from its features and from objects conveying personal and collective history. (from her Caribeean origins). In February, 2016, she introduced and realized collectively the semillero Caribe, an educational and artistic experiment questioning concepts of Caribbean authors through the body. The video Blue spelling… was realized by accumulation of drawings made by chalk on a blackboard and photographed with a fixed centring. The repetition of drawings and the always jerky changing rhythm of Blue spelling… lead an elusive image, which resists to be totally understood. The artwork spells our forgettings, writes a doubt in the black surface and the not linear time of a History made from breaks. A release of body which looks itself; an imagination of the representation of the black body, of how it sees itself and of how its vision of itself builds. In the light sleep, the perception of time differs for the broken echo. The chalk spells in soft speed an exile, and the repetition draws between obstinacy and disappearance.

Natalia Villanueva Linares is a French Peruvian artist who graduated from the National Superior Fine Arts School of Paris with the congratulations from the jury. Her work has been shown in two major exhibitions at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Paris, in galleries and art fairs in Los Angeles, Madrid, Chicago, Peoria, IL (USA), Berlin, and Lima. She is the founder of the art magazine Ukay-zine. Natalia has two distinct approaches of her work : she builds moments with a monumental feel for volume and colors and she unveils detail oriented situations charged with an intense metaphorical spirit. She often moves into the destruction of an object to produce transformations, opening the object to others, allowing destruction to become a gesture of distribution in which the notion of devotion is born. Most pieces have a protective role, they sacralize overproduction to highlight a multitude of sui generis imperfections.

For Sisters 1 — 10, each sister is a metal box of different colors and sizes. These opened boxes are put on a shelf, and contain a quantity of used wooden thread spools. All the threads go out from the box to meet in the same point nailed to the wall. This gesture allows to make visible the contents of each, what they have the thiner and colored. The film Breathing captures bunch by bunch, the creation of the piece Sister n°0. It is an encounter between the generosity of the object, a part of its history, and the viewer. The action is vital to the becoming of the piece and reveals the symbolic nature of the materials that are offered, little by little, as they are transformed into writing, words hidden from the gaze but present through strong sensitive evidence.

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¹ Hippolyte and Aricie (1733) is an opera by Jean-Philippe Rameau.

² Aguas de Março (1972) is a song by Antonio Carlos Jobim.