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TRANSCRIPT
BODY MEMORY
©Jean-Michel Pancin
©Shaun Gladwell
TOPOGRAPHY OF ART
BODY MEMORY
by Barbara Polla,1 curator of the exhibition
Memory and Forgetting, Body and Soul
I have more memories than if I’d lived a thousand years
A heavy chest of drawers, stuffed full With balance sheets, poems, love letters, lawsuits, Romances, locks of hair rolled up in receipts, Hides fewer secrets than my sullen skull.
Charles Baudelaire, Spleen (excerpt)
1 Barbara Polla is a medical doctor and was director of research at INSERM from 1992 to 2001. She is a gallerist (Analix Forever) and curator with a particular interest in video. A writer, she teaches creative and critical writing at HEAD, Geneva.
Memory, a crucial aspect of our lives, is generally viewed as a mental phenomenon, a faculty of the mind whose function is to record, conserve and recall information. Without memory, it seems impossible to learn. Without memory, surely, civilisations could not exist or evolve.
By locating memory in the brain, scientists have once again established a hierarchy between the mind and the body. But what if memory also resided in the body? And if the body’s memories were even more essential than the mind’s? Still, can body memories exist without the brain? Then again, who has thought to ask how “mental” memories could exist without the body?
And what about that twin corollary of memory, the wonderful, beneficial, vital ability to forget, which lightens, a force for relief, regeneration, rebirth and life itself? What does the forgetting, and how? The body or the mind?
The theme of this exhibition, BODY MEMORY, does not set out to answer these questions. The role of art is not to provide answers, but to go deeper into the questions and, sometimes, to show them in a different light. In this case, from the perspective of the body. The five video artists who feature in this show: Janet Biggs (United States), Ali Kazma (Turkey), mounir fatmi (Morocco), Shaun Gladwell (Australia) and Jean-Michel Pancin (France), and the poet-artist Robert Montgomery (United Kingdom), speak to us about the pre-eminence of the body and of its strategies of remembrance (the term applies particularly well to mounir fatmi’s recent work on phantom memories2). For BODY MEMORY, these six artists lay out before our eyes their often allusive approach to this theme, an approach that is fluid and mobile, like the images they work with, and operates in all 2 “Phantom limb” is the term used for the phenomenon whereby a limb continues to be felt even after it has been amputated. The brain (or the body?) “remembers” and recreates the no-longer-existing limb. To combat this illusion, the mirror test is used to show the patient that this limb he or she continues to feel does not actually exist. mounir fatmi was inspired by this phenomenon to conceive a sculpture, and then a whole exhibition, both titled “Constructing Illusion.”
tenses.
For Robert Montgomery, remembrance hides in a Trojan Horse. A strategy of the body – a belly – that carries within itself life, death, our dreams, and a memory of the future that is being written on the ruins of past recollection.
WE ARE JUST THE WRECKED AND BROKEN TROJAN HORSES OF OUR DREAMS
Video, mirror of memory
Françoise Parfait is the authority when it comes to the link between video art and memory. In her book Vidéo : un art contemporain,3 she argues that the video image always exists in the present, and points out that it enables a speed of apprehension of the world whereby the images we see immediately acquire memory status once they are no longer before our eyes: video thus reproduces the effects of our gaze, moving constantly over a world that is itself constantly in motion. Video proceeds as memory does: the registering of what is seen is almost simultaneous with the “storing” of the image. We can then call this up, the way memory summons a recollection (Parfait calls this “déstockage”: decumulation). Concepts of memory reflect the technology of the age in which they were formulated. Plato and Aristotle imagined memory as thoughts inscribed on wax tablets that could easily be erased or altered. Today, memory is compared to video. Memory as a camera that films, stores and recycles the huge amounts of data that we accumulate in the course of our lives.
If, in its relation to the present and to the immediate, video comes close to the process of memory, its technological aspect further heightens this analogy because of the immaterial nature of the image: the video image is a moving image, and this conditions the way we perceive it. “It is an evanescent image suited to conveying subtle movements of the flickering of form and thought.”4
3 Paris: Éditions du Regard, 2001. 4 Laetitia Ferrer, http://laklik.blogspot.fr/2009/10/video-substitut-technologique-memoire.html�
Moreover, the instability and incompleteness of video images require the viewer to mobilise their memory and keep their perceptual system in a state of permanent alert. We can say, therefore, that video, by virtue of its nature as a medium, offers a new perceptual landscape in which space and time reflect a process of thinking in images that is also the way memory works.5
As Jean-Marc Lachaud, has written on the subject of collage, “Works involving collage and montage combine concrete reality and the fantastical, the here and the elsewhere, the non-contemporary and the current, the identifiable and the bizarre. They trace and erase the contours of new territories to be explored. They build ephemeral passages in which figures of the unknown are there to be deciphered. They disorient, perturb, destabilize and provoke.”6 And that is exactly what artists like Janet Biggs and mounir fatmi do in their videos: make collages. Thanks to “collage,” video has also become a choice medium for the study and representation of crossovers between art and the sciences, especially the sciences of memory. For example, video is the natural medium for Janet Biggs in her recent research and work on the links between the sciences of memory and her own art. It becomes the very concrete memory of her artistic performances – her “video performances,” as they are called.
Memory is multiple
If memory is extraordinarily complex, this is also because it is multiple. Yes, it is cerebral and corporeal, but it is also cellular, immune, electronic and physical. It can be social and collective.
Fire together, wire together7
Neuronal memory is perpetuated through the network of neurons, and via specialized connections between neurons called “synapses.” A neuron that sends a signal via a synapse is called “pre-synaptic,” 5 Laetitia Ferrer, ibid.� 6 Jean-Marc Lachaud, “De l’usage du collage en art au xxe siècle, cultures-esthétiques” – 8 – 2000 7 This is the expression used by American neurobiologist Carla J. Shatz.� �9. Feige U., Morimoto R., Polla B., Stress-inducible cellular responses, Springer Verlag, 1996
and a neuron that receives it is called “post-synaptic.” Synapses have considerable plasticity and plasticity is today seen as the basis of our learning process and of the formation of our memory. “Hebbian” theory – after the neuroscientist Donald Hebb – holds that a synapse becomes more active when the “pre-synaptic” neuron repeatedly “discharges” and continually stimulates its post-synaptic counterpart to also “discharge.” In these Hebbian synapses,8 neurons that discharge together become connected: hence the expression fire together, wire together.
Cell memory
All living cells have the capacity to feel and recall the stress to which they have been subjected (this cellular capacity to recollect earlier stress, meaning that they are better able to resist similar stress in the future, was the subject of my own biomedical research9). Although cells do not have a central nervous system, they do “feel” stress – in this instance, a threat to their survival – and are capable of responding to it, of protecting themselves, and of “remembering.” Now, if cells have a memory, then why not the whole body, its muscles, nerves and organs?
Immune memory
The immune system, which controls our capacity to resist infections and reject foreign bodies (including grafts) is a fascinating model of cell memory which is as powerful as it is selective. As Thucydides averred 2400 years ago in Athens, “no one gets the plague twice.”10
Our body’s capacity to retain the specific cells of an anti-gene, enabling it to react effectively to a second exposure to this same anti-gene, is what underlies the conception and effectiveness of vaccination. The capacity of immune “memory cells” to distinguish 8 p://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory 9 Feige U., Morimoto R., Polla B., Stress-inducible…, op cit.
10 Quoted by Neil A. Campbell and Jane B. Reece, Biologie, Brussels: De Boeck Université, 2004 (2nd ed., 1st ed.: 1995).
between self and non-self shows how fundamentally important memory is in the constitution of the “self.”
“Physical” memory
In material physics, “shape memory” is the capacity of certain alloys to “remember” their initial shape and to return to it after they have been pulled out of shape.11 Alloys are said to have either “one-way” shape memory, which enables them to return to their original shape after mechanical deformation, or “two-way” memory, which, after the “learning” process, enables the alloy to acquire two stable positions: one above the so-called “critical” temperature, and the other below it. This capacity of physical bodies to “remember” is perhaps the best illustration of the way bodies remember their initial shape – or original events. It may be, too, that death has something to do with this process of remembering the initial form: “In the sweat of your face shall you eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you shall return.”12 Could the light so often seen in near-death experiences be memory’s reproduction of our arrival in the world: an intense luminous perception after passing through the “tunnel” of life? In his work on imprisonment Jean-Michel Pancin describes how those who are released experience a similar dazzlement when they return to the “normal” light of the world: “When a prisoner passes through the exit door, the first aggression is the light. Having lived endlessly in half-light and under neons, prisoners’ eyes are sorely tried by the purity of southern light. Dazzlement and luminous artefacts are among the aggressions they experience.”13
It may even be that the loss of memory at the end of life is part of this process: the return to anteriority, to pristine memory.
11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape-memory_alloy 12 Genesis 3, 17-19 (King James Bible). 13 Cf. “Sortir” by Jean-Michel Pancin in Paul Ardenne, Magda Danysz, Barbara Polla (eds.) L’Ennemi public, La Muette, 2013.
Body memory
My skin remembers sunshine, my toes remember sand, soles of my feet – wooltickle of rugs, gritknobbles and lumps of uneven land. My ears remember sparrowsong and rattley rain on roofs. My tongue remembers raspberries, my nose the smell of stinky shoes. My eyes remember buttercups and sea-grey seals and blue...
Jan Dean, Whole Body Memory
The various kinds of non-mental memory that I have simply alluded to here constitute an important argument for the existence of “body memory” as such. This form of memory is called “repressed” in that it exists outside the control of consciousness. It is often manifested by physical symptoms and can, for long periods, elude any kind of rationalisation, whether by those who possess it, or by those who try to decipher it, whether professionals or members of the person’s entourage. It does indeed seem that certain kinds of memories of delicious, traumatic, formative or terrible events are so deeply lodged in the mind that only the body can remember them. Curiously enough, doctors, psychologists, osteopaths and other therapists with an interest in body memory almost always refer to seemingly forgotten suffering, as if only pain could bring this form of body memory into play.
“Your body has a memory,” writes psychotherapist Myriam Brousse.14 As she sees it, the human body keeps within itself buried memories of our sufferings as children, and even as a foetus, as well, potentially, of those of our parents and ancestors. To work on body memory is to track the traces of these deep memories that our mind has forgotten but that our organism remembers. “Imprinted in the muscles and the bones, and into the flesh, these sufferings resonate in our body and are awakened by the events of life,” writes Brousse. For her, the challenge is to find and understand the roots of these sufferings, and then to “repair” the body so that we ceases to be the victim of body memory but can freely control it instead: apprehending, comprehending, accepting and even consciously accepting traumatic
14 Myriam Brousse, Votre corps a une mémoire, Paris: Marabout, 2013.
experiences could help us regain our health and psychophysical harmony.
The recent work of Daniela Schiller, Joseph LeDoux and Elizabeth Phelps at New York University suggests the possibility of “extinguishing” negative memories — and therefore, potentially, positive memories as well, even if the clinical practices that might stem from this work which is still at an experimental stage could raise fundamental ethical questions.15 This research casts a fresh light on the notions of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)16 and Post Slavery Stress Syndrome17 – whereby, it is argued, great social traumas such as racism and slavery are handed down from generation to generation. It also sheds light on possible failures of memory, with the result that American judges tend to be more sceptical about witness statements that, before this new insight into the manipulation of memory, would have been judged reliable. This work, superbly described by Michael Specter in his exhaustive article,18 inspired the performance that Janet Biggs made in Houston on 17 April 2015, in collaboration with Elizabeth Phelps and Joseph LeDoux, as part of her video exhibition on the theme of Alzheimer’s disease at the Blaffer Museum, Houston, Echo of the Unknown (2015).19
A heroic performance: when the body loses its head
After Echo of the Unkown, Janet Biggs made If Ever I Would Leave You, a live performance in three tableaux. In the first of these, she and four other persons, speaking through the intermediary of an actor, told of a life-changing event affecting a friend, a loved one, or their own person: Alzheimer’s. Biggs’ own family history sheds light
15 “Extinction during reconsolidation of threat memory diminishes prefrontal cortex involvement,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, PNAS 2013 110 (50) 20040–20045. 16 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posttraumatic_stress_disorder 17 Joy Degruy Leary, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing, Uptone Press, 2005. 18 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/19/partial-recall 19 Barbara Polla, Janet Biggs, “Parallel Worlds,” in Echo of the Unkown, Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston, Texas USA, ISBN 978-0-941193-01-6.
on the performance: one day, her grandfather, who by now neither recognised her nor knew her name, sat down at the piano and, without hesitation, played and sang “If Ever I Would Leave You,” the famous song from Camelot, the musical inspired by Arthurian legend.20
In the second act, Biggs volunteered to undergo an experiment by Phelps and LeDoux. However, rather than try to “extinguish” a bad memory, she put into play one of her dearest memories, namely, the associations of autonomy, movement, freedom and pride that she feels – felt – at the thought of horses.
In the third scene, a horse appears, and then a gymnast dancing on the horse, as if immune to gravity, and thus symbolically restores Biggs’ positive associations with horses, associations that helped construct her own self-image. All this to the sound of “If Ever I Would Leave You.”
Interestingly, Biggs defines body memory as a memory that comes into play when the usual references are lost, just like in the performance described here. As she herself puts it, “When the familiar is stripped away and the known becomes unknown, there are moments of acute presence where frailty and manifest strength co-exist. These moments are body memory.”
Not only in this performance but throughout her work, Biggs exploits her ability to engender complex emotional states in the viewer by revealing her own, to compel our attention by means of disorientation, displacement and ambiguity, prompting both in ourselves (and in herself) the need to rebalance. She undermines our stereotypes, particularly limiting concepts related to gender, the body, physical or mental freedom, and self-transcendence. Take the received idea that the Alzheimer’s sufferer is a “lost” being: here the mirror is turned back on us and it seems suddenly that we are lost when faced with the reality of this cerebral transformation we cannot grasp. Or the stereotype of autism as an irremediable confinement. Biggs suggests another side by showing us this young girl who, though visibly disturbed, glides over the ice with a grace and ease that we could never emulate (Bright Shiny Objects, single-channel 20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camelot_(musical)
video, 2004).
Or, another stereotype: the freedom of the horse, that creature close to Biggs’ heart and at the core of her art. The galloping horse as the very image of natural freedom. Yes, but what happens when the horse runs in endless circles in a manège (juxtaposed, or collaged, with the autistic child in Bright Shiny Objects)?
Like the scientist, the artist helps increase the complexity of the world, and not to simplify it; to complexify it by adding new pieces to the jigsaw of knowledge and new collages of images. Biggs imagines and suggests new possible futures, enriched with previously unimagined discoveries and correspondences, impelled by the “need to lift immediate, lived reality ‘out of its rut” and shatter its illusory and deceitful shell”21 and thus to reveal new realities that also include dreams – surrealities, therefore. These instil within us the intuition that lives we generally consider as “damaged” are rich with a meaning that we could perhaps perceive, if only we listened properly. The worlds of childhood, of old age, of disability and madness, are rarely considered as and for what they are: elsewhere states of which we can understand only tiny fragments. Maybe one day we will be able to hear the songs sung by the neurons of those we love, and know how to interpret them. Maybe that day will never come. But the taste for utopia – that taste which, when strong enough, allows us to serenely envisage the impossible – is strong in Biggs. The artist is one of those people able to hear, directly, “the voice of silent things”22 and of those who cannot, or can no longer, speak. A language that suddenly becomes more real than our everyday words.
Memory algorithms
Emblematic of BODY MEMORY, U000 + U001 is a video in which Jean-Michel Pancin evokes the remembering process in his own body. As a boy, he loved skating and, spending six hours a day out on the ice over some ten years, he developed into an elite performer. 21 Jean-Marc Lachaud, De l’usage du collage en art au xxe siècle, op. cit.�
22 Baudelaire, Élévation, “Spleen et ideal” section, Les Fleurs du Mal. See also Polla, op. cit. p. 18.
Then, at the age of sixteen, medical reasons forced him to give up his beloved sport. He became an artist, interested in confinement, constraint and in escaping the self: in elevation.
Having passed the age of forty, his nostalgia became so strong that he decided to put his body memory to work, while at the same conceiving a unique video-performance (and potential series). He got out those skates he wore when he was sixteen – too small, now – and launched out onto the ice, where his movements etched his beloved algorithms. The body remembers everything and the video U000 + U001 (a first work, then, in two parts – 0 and 1 – of a series titled “Utopologia” or, again, “Dehors Avant,” after the name of the figure he skated: 2014) attests to this fact.
During those ten years of intensive skating, Pancin spent three hours a day practising “compulsory figures.” These consisted in reproducing on the ice the perfect circles that had been traced with a compass, and then recreating them, but without the model. The circle, that primary form, requires intense concentration on the part of the skater. “I had to acquire perfect movements, working in monastic silence and solitude,” says Pancin. “Training started very early in the morning. There was no one there. You turned up and you whirled around, whirled around, like a whirling dervish. And, at the end, you had to trace three perfect circles on the unblemished ice. Three traces in one.”
The artist-skater’s body memory is deep-rooted, deep like the grooves made in him by those infinitely repeated circles. These were the grooves that Pancin recaptured, via his body memory, for U000 + U001.
In order to bring us this confrontation with the ice rink, the artist used GoPro microcameras fitted to his skates and helmet, showing us what the skater himself can never see: the tracing of the lines, and overall views alternating with close-ups of the movements. In this way the viewer becomes a close witness of the performer’s struggle with and against himself, with and against his body, intimately associated with the mental visualisation of the movements, with the mentalisation of the body. As so often in Pancin’s work, mathematics and philosophy also subtly innervate this poetic and aesthetic undertaking. The extreme tension that develops between movement and concentration becomes paradigmatic of the very notion of
equilibrium, a notion that features prominently in the work of many other video performers, among them Matthew Barney. U000 + U001 also brings to mind L'Expédition scintillante, Acte 3, Untitled (Black Ice Stage) (2002) by Pierre Huyghe, a work in which a skater, smiling ecstatically, glides for hours on a rink of black ice. Bright Shiny Objects also constitutes an extra link between the artists Jean-Michel Pancin and Janet Biggs.
The “dehors avant,” the basic figure, traces a figure eight on the ice, thereby evoking the figure of infinity, and this infinity is also a place, the tiny place of the life of the body. As Pancin says, “The point is to give the moment full responsibility, because you will never achieve perfection. This memory work by the body is, in a way, pathetic, but it’s also playful and pleasurable.” Here, Pancin inscribes his algorithms and the “dehors avant” in the history of art.
Interestingly, in an almost parallel process, a team of researchers at EPFL have developed a realist model of the memory that goes beyond the concept of Hebbian synapses and takes into account the notion of “assemblages of memory” integrated into a third generation neuronal network called “spiking neural networks.”23 Whereas time is becoming a key component of this new model, scientists have derived a complex algorithm – an algorithmic representation, as used in his art by Jean-Michel Pancin – of their results. The researchers at EPFL believe that these algorithms could help improve our overall knowledge of the brain and modulate our strategic approaches to understanding memory systems.
Body memory, memory of place
Ali Kazma, who is known, notably, for his representations of human work, has also taken an interest in body memory, notably in his “Obstructions” and “Resistance” series. By “obstruction” Kazma is referring to the obstruction of time and death, and the way that man, with his hands, his constant work, his skill and the acquired competence of the body, fills the world with objects (watches,
23 Zenke F., Agnes E.J., Gerstner W., Diverse synaptic plasticity mechanisms orchestrated to form and retrieve memories in spiking neural networks, Nature Communications 6:6922, 2015
machines, factories, cars, clothes, robots); the way he taxidermises, operates, tattoos scarifies and stamps. As for resistance, by that he means the way our body acts as our ultimate bastion as individuals against uniformisation, against constraint, imprisonment, globalisation and depersonalisation. The reappropriation of the individual body often involves singular practices, such as tattooing or scarification, as mentioned above, but also kinbaku (bondage). Kazma went to film this ancient Japanese ritual performed by one of its great masters, and when we watch the resulting video, Kinbaku (2013), we feel in our own body the displacement of the limbs, the creation of a new bodily axis, a suspension that is probably painful but never damaging for the body thanks to the dexterity of the master. Sensations are magnified in a new echo with our own bodies, beyond the limits of the everyday. A state of grace. The loss of gravity. Abandon. And we, as spectators, keep coming back to the image with our gaze to find, again and again, these sensations, just as the women and men who practice kinbaku come back to the master.
Like Kinbaku, Calligraphy (2013) is part of the “Resistance” series which occupied the Turkish Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. Calligraphy as a choreography of the hand and arm, as the result of perfect elegance, the elegance that can be acquired only after a long apprenticeship and submission to the discipline’s rules of excellence. One might indeed think that writing draws primarily on mental memory, but when we watch Calligraphy we realise that what fascinates Kazma is indeed this process of learning movements, and the body memory that, after years of practice and work, makes it possible to create perfect upstrokes and downstrokes with no more apparent effort than is needed to “decumulate” the memory.
However, Kazma does also try to film mental work. Already, in 2011, his first major solo show in Paris at Topographie de l’Art was titled “How to Film a Poet?” How does one film creative, artistic work? After several films of work resulting in plastic creations (the pottery of Alev Siesbye in Studio Ceramist, 2007; the canvases of Jacques Coulais in Painter, 2010), Kazma turned towards another approach: filming the creative process of Turkish artist Füsun Onur.24 He chose 24 Emre Baykal, Whoever Enters This Room..., catalogue of the exhibition by Füsun Onur at ARTER, “Through the Looking Glass,” Istanbul: Ilkay Baliç, 2014.
to follow the injunction contained in the text by the exhibition curator, Emre Baykal: to “enter this room.” To enter, in other words, the place of creation, seeking out the memory of place, the ties between the place and the body, the way the place modulates the body’s position and perceptions, the way the body and art are steeped in place.
Home (2014) is more than a “home”; it is a set “of colours, of forms, of perfumes, of sounds; it is roses, violets and chrysanthemums in vases of porcelain and crystal; it is wood, silver, beads, feathers, satin, velvet.”25 With Home, Kazma goes deeper than ever before into what constitutes the private world of an artist, with a delicacy that combines respect, sagacity, acuity, admiration and even tenderness. By virtue of this memory of place, the marvelling viewer discovers and, again, feels in their own body, through the medium of these fluid images (a fluidity of the image edited in Kasma’s distinctive way), the world of Füsun Onur.
Jean-Michel Pancin, too, works on the memory of place, albeit in a very different context: his concern is to understand the physical memory of a former prisoner. The memory of the place of confinement.
When working on the prison of Sainte-Anne in Avignon, Pancin met C. and, with him, made a video in several phases, titled Tout dépendait du temps (It all depended on the weather/time). C. drew “his” prison from memory. “C. spent twenty years at the prison of Sainte-Anne in Avignon,” writes Pancin. “His hands drew the plan of his prison while he told me of his memories. With each sequence he drew a new slice of life, and each corresponding plan was added to the previous one. To the sound of his Provençal accent, what became visible, along with the plan of ‘his prison,’ was his memory, as inscribed in that place.” The artist and C. visited the now abandoned prison together at night. “For an hour and a half, I followed C. in complete and utter darkness, my only beacon his voice and the green images shown by the camera. I realised that in this complete darkness C. knew exactly where he was going. Even more strangely, at one spot he sat on a step, at another he rested his back on a wall and folded his leg, his foot flat, and each time he said that 25 Emre Baykal, ibid
this was where he often stood or sat, exactly in that position. I realised that in those twenty years of imprisonment he had completely assimilated the spaces we were in, or at least the ones we had access to. In a way, the place inhabited him, and he could not leave it. In the exercise yard, standing in his usual place, he gazed for a long time at the starry sky.”26
Play
As we recall, speaking of his video-performance U000 + U001, Pancin said that “This memory work by the body is, in a way, pathetic, but it’s also playful and pleasurable.”
Play by Ali Kazma (2015) is certainly playful, if only by virtue of its title, and because the actors of the Wooster Group “play” Hamlet. On the stage, they are playing. They play, or rather, they replay, what the body has already learned: gestures, words, expressions, intonations, looks. These have been learned and rehearsed, rehearsed, rehearsed and rehearsed again, until the body memorises them so perfectly that the audience never sees anything other than perfect naturalness, a flawless incarnation. Pathos sometimes comes across in these rehearsals: on stage, it is playful and pleasurable!
Play prompts amazement on several levels: first of all, this video is a new element in the artist’s exploration of “How to Film a Poet.” In addition, this is one of the few videos by Kazma in which words play a natural role, for here speech is the work, or at least part of the work. Moreover – and this is particularly significant in the context of memory – not only does Play show memorisation, particularly by Scott Shepherd (Hamlet), but the production directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, integrates the memory of another Hamlet, played by Richard Burton (in 1964), through the intermediary of a black-and-white video that we see at the back of the stage, as if partially erased by time but, at the same time, stunning in its presence. The Shepherd-Burton dialogue becomes a kind of madness, a dialogue between ghosts, in which the now legendary Shepherd integrates into his own acting the acting and spirit of that other legendary Hamlet, 26 Jean-Michel Pancin, op. cit., p. 12.
deceased now but “memorialised” by video, alongside Hamlet himself.27 In Play, therefore, the memory of the stage rehearsal, of the movements and words learned, is juxtaposed with the memory of another time, of another rhythm, of a Hamlet in black and white, in an extraordinary evocation of the multiple layers of memory. Finally, Play touches on the sublime: the artist has managed with a masterly eye to combine scenes of dread in Hamlet, the life of the troupe, and the ghost of Burton, and, by his highly distinctive framing and editing – the “Kazma manner” – to make us feel the violence and terror, the immediacy of death, and disappearance, but always going back, layer after layer, to humanity and its infinite poetic representations.
Sleep and sex
Memory plays and is played in sleep, too. It plays games with us. It collects forgotten images from our stock of images, recomposes them, mixes them with others, utterly disregarding the sequence of their recording. It animates them and brings them its own movements, colours and sounds. Dreams are videos produced by our memory: recording, composition, storage, reuse, reframing, montage, play, stop, rewind.
All these processes are at work in Sleep Al Naim (The Sleeper, 2005-2011), by mounir fatmi. For this film fatmi took his inspiration from Sleep, in which Andy Warhol filmed the poet John Giorno sleeping for hours on end. He too filmed a poet, sleeping peacefully, his torso rising and falling to the rhythm of his breathing. Who is this poet? Salman Rushdie, a contemporary icon of freedom of expression. Did fatmi really film Rushdie? Not exactly. Having tried in vain to get in touch with the poète maudit so that he could film him in his sleep, fatmi decided to use digital technology and create the image of the sleeping writer. But what about his breathing? In fact, it is the breath of fatmi himself, who has thus “animated” Rushdie in two different ways: by creating his image, and with his own breath. Sleep Al Naim achieves a real fusion of the artist with his “subject.” Perhaps, too, this film by fatmi offers an answer to Ali Kazma’s
27 �27. http://thewoostergroup.org/twg/twg.php?hamlet
question, How to film a poet? By embodying him. As a result of watching Rushdie’s body in the intimacy of sleep, for such an extended duration (the long version of fatmi’s film lasts six hours), we attain the inner gaze, precisely because the eyes are closed, the vision turned inwards, towards the darkness of dreams, towards the memory of images that the brain draws on to create new ones that are visible only “from the inside.” During the very long process of making this film, mounir fatmi “entered the inner world” of Salman Rushdie, gazed at his dreams, and now evokes them for us, but without showing them. However, after a few hours of viewing, Rushdie’s existence becomes real, his presence palpable, and the viewer, amazed by the duration and serenity of his sleep, feels an intense desire to touch this body, to know it, to further penetrate this vital intimacy, to share the deep gentleness that emanates from this man – from these images.
The film’s aesthetic is typical of fatmi’s style, both in the appropriation of existing images that work to convey his ideas, and in the use of black-and-white. The latter is no coincidence, for as James Casebere (quoted by Robert Juarez) puts it, “Black and white had more to do with memory and the past. Color was too much about the present, I associated it with color TV, which was not a part of my past. I wanted the images to be related to a sense of history, let’s say, whether personal or social.”28 His words could have been spoken exactly with Sleep Al Naim in mind.
Always concerned with freedom of expression, which for him is essential, mounir fatmi also considers sex, and does so with great delicacy, usually in the form of videos like Something is possible (2006) and, above all, Les Ciseaux (The Scissors, 2003). To make this jewel of a film, fatmi edited together censored love scenes (literally cut with scissors) from Une minute de soleil en moins (A Minute of Sun Less), a film made by Nabil Ayouch that same year. With Les Ciseaux, fatmi has produced a threefold work of memory: first of all, he preserves Ayouch’s original film, to keep it from being forgotten; secondly, he delivers a frontal critique of censorship, to keep that too from being forgotten (in this regard, the film can almost be seen as a documentary made, as the artist puts it, “in collaboration 28 http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/education/school-educator-programs/teacher-resources/arts-curriculum-online?view=item&catid=732&id=154
with Moroccan fundamentalists and censors” – in that he uses their work of censorship as the raw material for Les Ciseaux); and thirdly, it is a discourse on love, to keep us from forgetting – as if we could: witness Alfred de Musset’s words on the subject.29
Furthermore, in Les Ciseaux fatmi achieves a juxtaposition or, rather, a shifting between bodily embraces and the dreams that go with them. The memory of the lovers plays the role of the video maker, and in Les Ciseaux we go from intertwining bodies to inner images.
Shaun Gladwell: uterine memory, romantic memory
Shaun Gladwell is known and renowned as an artist of the body and of movement, an artist of the sovereign gesture, as analysed by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev,30 and an artist of body memory, too, according to Simon Rees.31 Gladwell treats the body as an absolute, pushing it to the extreme border of life and death, as indicated by the title of one of his earliest videos, Riding with Death (Redux) (1999–2011), or in what, to date, is his most famous work, Apologies 1-6 (2007–2009), in which his journey along the roads of Australia often seems tantamount, both in the artist’s eyes and in our own, to a crossing of the Styx. Gladwell is the “corpopoetic”32 artist par excellence: here is the body hanging between life and death, arms spread out crosswise; the body-machine, the biker body, the virtuoso body, the body as combat. All these bodies constitute an ongoing, performative creation that is driven to the point of loss of consciousness. But that loss is also acted, calculated and, consequently, under control. For, beyond movement, Gladwell is also
29 “On est souvent trompé en amour, souvent blessé et souvent malheureux ; mais on aime, et quand on est sur le bord de sa tombe, on se retourne pour regarder en arrière et on se dit : j'ai souffert souvent, je me suis trompé quelquefois, mais j'ai aimé.” (We are often deceived in love, often wounded, and often unhappy; but we love, and when we stand on the edge of our tomb, we turn and look back and we say: I have suffered, often, I have been wrong sometimes, but I have loved.) 30 . Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, “Means With No End,” in Maddestmaximus, Melbourne: Schwartz City, 2009. 31 Simon Rees, “The Sixth Side of the Prism: Looking for Shaun Gladwell,” in Shaun Gladwell, Cycles of Radical Will, Bexhill-on-Sea: De La Warr Pavilion, 2013 32 Paul Ardenne, “Corpopoetic Gestures, Gestes Corpopoétiques,” in Shaun Gladwell, The Lacrima Chair, published by SCAF, Sydney, Australia, 2015�.
and, above all, an artist of mastery. Of mastery of the body? Yes, but not only that. For that is the means whereby he seeks to achieve mastery of time. That is why slow motion is such a key element in his work, making him one of the great romantic artists of our day.33
Several of Gladwell’s videos establish a powerful symbolic link between his man’s body and the woman’s uterus he once inhabited. In Pacific Undertow Sequence (2010), Gladwell spins around in the ocean like a foetus in its amniotic inner world. In Interceptor Surf Sequence (2009), Gladwell’s body emerges from the car that is his companion in travel like a foetus emerging from the uterus, then immediately gets back inside it (is it not the finest vehicle?), whereas in a recent video, whose connection to the earlier one is manifest in its title, Interceptor Deluge Sequence (2015), we see the typical Gladwell figure of a man dressed and helmeted in black emerge once again from his car, this time at a carwash, perform a few dance steps on his bare feet (the only sign of his fragility), caress the sides of car, with its eminently feminine anatomy, before being sprayed with the white washing liquid, a superabundant white foam whose suggestion of sperm is all the more marked in that the protagonist is holding the spray gun. In the end, he again gets back inside the car. The memory that impels him seems as powerful in his videos as the memory of the body trained, worked and constantly pushed to its limits. And the faster the body goes, the more the image is slowed.
Slow motion – this desire to master time – is also at the centre of Gladwell’s latest video, produced for BODY MEMORY. This experimental work breaks new ground. It is dedicated to his childhood love, Tripitaka, the young monk who was the hero/heroine of the cult Japanese TV series Monkey, played by the actress Masako Natsume. Shaun’s memory is intense, acutely sensitive: Tripitaka was his first love, and it was an ambitious, passionate, unforgettable love. Masako Natsume, who died of leukaemia at the age of 27, is a legend in Japan where, like Shaun, many other boys fell madly in love with Tripitaka, with that sometimes panic-stricken, confused sense that they were falling in love with a boy. For Shaun, Tripitaka personifies the discovery of love, a powerful sexual love even though the boy he was at the time did not know what sex really was. 33 Adapted from Barbara Polla, “Doppelgänger,” in Shaun Gladwell, The Lacrima Chair, published by SCAF, Sydney: Australia, 2015.
Tripitaka is rooted in the artist’s memory, in the memory of his childhood body awakening to love. She made that deep mark in him that only amour fou can make, a mark and a memory that is at once physical and psychic.
This is the mark, the love, that Gladwell refers to in Tripitaka (2015), a portrait made – for the first time in his career – with sequences of images that he did not film himself, but that he cropped recomposed and, above all, slowed down. Echoing them is music by Morton Feldman, the American composer whose love of slowness, gentleness and even disappearance is well known.
Another first here is that Gladwell accompanies his video work with poems dedicated to Tripitaka. We know that he published his first artist’s book this spring,34 and now, here, he is publishing his first poems.
34 Shaun Gladwell, Patafunctions, Semiotext{e}, Columbia University, New York, Foreign Agent Series, distributed by MIT Press, 2015.
Poems to Tripitaka
You and your spirit crew
Methought I saw my late espoused monk
The greatest T.V. Buddhist babe
Tripitaka
my disguised girl
sing her name on the television
and radio
see her in the magazines
through Tokyo lanes
dressed
in tranquil robes
Imagining myself to be all the spirits that protects her
Can I be Sandy?
the ex-cannibal sea monster spirit
hovering behind my lover
or Pigsy?
the ugly but sweet fool spirit
that makes her laugh
or Monkey?
who is the real kick-ass protector
wild but gallant in his fearless protection.
I take my two fingers
and shake them
then blow
and summons a cloud chariot
to take her away with me.
Tripitaka would only need to radiate
a single simile
to inspire
lives of dedication f
rom her spirit protectors
and I
The Apparition of Tripitaka
I.
I see you now
boy monk
dressed in golden robes
of a long pilgrimage
carried by donkey
protected by your spirit crew
take me with you
move my hand
II.
I know you Tripitaka
as the shy girl Masako
beneath the character of that boy monk
it’s you! T
he most radiant
and sexed woman imaginable
s eyes/sweet smile/compassionate touch
I nervously undress your yellow robes
with my ten year old year old mind
not knowing what I will find
Thinking I will go to a christian hell
for even dreaming this of a sexless Buddhist monk?
And yet
I choose you
the boy in me
at the beginning of his river dreams
and the man now
chooses you Masako
dressed as Tripitaka
impossible bride
please touch me
and making me grow
up close, I can now see your hair flow
behind a plastic skull cap
pulchritudinous breasts strapped and flattened
to appear as a boy
but Tripitaka
through their lightning power
your lips and eyes
could not switch sex
III.
even now Masako,
you remain Tripitaka
and your monk memory
still brings lightning to loins
desire is also your Dharma
take me with you
to the leukemia
tell me of the departure from this
world of illusions
your torment before reaching the cycles end
young lifeless body
releasing the spirit of a monk
why did Gautama choose you to join that stupid 27 club?
did you reach the end of misery?
please touch and tell
this disciple
who is still dreaming of you
these young dreams of you
trapped in an aging man
still deep in the cycle
of suffering for you in formless Nirvana
Memory and poetry
It is no coincidence if Gladwell’s work of memory in relation to his deceased idol should take the form of poetry as well as video, for poetry too does the work of memory, even if it less recognised for its memory effects than video. Poetry is always the most discreet of practices. Stéphane Hessel’s book Ô ma mémoire : La poésie, ma nécessité pays a precious tribute to the importance – the necessity – of poetry in the processes of memory.35 It is not simply a matter, here, of learning poems by heart. Reading Ô ma mémoire we learn that the 88 poems in the volume – from François Villon to Shakespeare, from Hölderlin to Keats, from Rilke to Apollinaire – have all played an important, even decisive role in the author’s life – a decisive role in his memory, and in his memoires. “Poetry as respiration, poetry as a backbone, poetry as a necessity,” in the editor’s words.
This notion of the backbone can also be found in Mayakovski, who speaks of memory and backbone:
Memory! Gather into the brain’s auditorium The bottomless lines of those who are dear to me. From eye to eye, pour mirth into all of them. Light up the night with the by-gone festivity. From body to body, pour the joyous mood. Let no man forget this night. Listen to me, I will play the flute. On my backbone tonight.36
It is also for his poetry, and for his constant tributes to artists of the past that constitute the very personal and very French – Victor Hugo, Courbet37 – pantheon of his artistic memory, that Robert Montgomery opens BODY MEMORY with his Trojan Horse. And brings it to a close with an ecological memory, a memory of nature, which has
35 Stéphane Hessel, Ô ma mémoire : La poésie, ma nécessité, Paris: Seuil, 2006 36.
36 Vladimir Mayakovski, “The Backbone Flute,” 1915, translated by Andrey Kneller (excerpt). 37 Barbara Polla, “Love Still Around Somewhere,” in Robert Montgomery, Distanz: Henrik Wobbe Ed., 2015
barely been mentioned here so far. As the editor of his recent work observes, “His texts render his reflections visible and trace the memories of a place and its people.”38
THE MOUNTAINS MUST HAVE IMAGINED THE CITY IN THEIR ECHO AND THEY DREW IT IN THE SKY FOR US/ AND THE SEA BIRDS CARRIED MESSAGES FROM THE WATER TO THE MOUNTAIN BIRDS AS THE SEA ROCKS WALKED HERE SLOWLY
The body is considered by the artists in this exhibition as an essential, fundamental locus, where our life is engaged, in which we accumulate our memories, with which we create, with which we accompany the movements of the world.
38 Henrik Wobbe, 2015
Janet Biggs
Janet Biggs was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1959. She lives and works in New York. Her BFA from Moore College of Art was followed by graduate studies at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Biggs is best known for her work in video, photography and performance. She is interested in extreme situations, and particularly in the people engaged in such situations. She watches, observes and films with almost scientific attention. Her subjects have included miners, wrestlers, speed champions (Leslie Porterfield on her bike) and professional synchronised swimmers. She has filmed the Artic, the Taklamakan Desert, and an active volcano.
Biggs’ videos invite us to share extraordinary experiences. Her works reveal great richness of meaning and emotion, with the sublime, music and collage and documentary aesthetics coming together in a mysterious theatre of hybrid images.
In 2015 she had a major exhibition at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, Texas, Echo of the Unknown, exploring the role of memory in the construction of identity.
Biggs has also exhibited at the first International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Cartagena, Colombia; at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon, France; at the Vantaa Art Museum, Finland; at the Linköpings Konsthall, Passagen, Sweden; at the Landesmuseum Oberösterreichisches, Austria; at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Rome, Italy; and at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan.
mounir fatmi
mounir fatmi was born in Tangier, Morocco, in 1970. He lives and works in Paris. This internationally renowned French-based Moroccan artist makes work that reflects his position as a nomad torn between cultures, boldly engaging with the history of modernity, the desacralisation of the religious object, deconstruction, the end of dogmas and ideologies. His political subjects question the contemporary world through the representation of its violences and its paradoxes.
His works (video, installation, drawing, sculpture) are also language games which combine diverse and potentially opposed cultural signs. mounir fatmi opens up spaces of debate and questions the forms and discourses of authority, freedoms, truth and legitimacy.
In early 2015 mounir fatmi had a major exhibition at MAMCO Geneva titled Permanent Exiles, evoking recurrent themes in his work such as identity, history, the body and language.
mounir fatmi has taken part in group shows at the following: the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; the Brooklyn Museum, New York, USA; the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; the Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem, Israel; the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, Russia; the Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar; the Hayward Gallery, London, UK; the Art Gallery of Western Australia and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK.
His installations have featured in several biennials: the 52nd and 54th Venice Biennales, the 8th Sharjah Biennial and the 5th and 7th Dakar Biennales, the 2nd Seville Biennial, the 5th Gwangju Biennale, the 10th Biennale de Lyon, the 5th Auckland Triennial and Fotofest 2014, Houston, Texas.
mounir fatmi has won several prizes, including the Cairo Biennale Prize in 2010, the Uriot Prize, Amsterdam, in 2006, and the Grand Prix Léopold Sédar Senghor at the 7th Dakar Biennale in 2006.
Shaun Gladwell
Shaun Gladwell was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1972. He lives and works in London, UK. He holds a BFA from University of Arts in Sydney, and MFAs from the New South Wales College of Fine Arts and from Goldsmiths College, London.
Gladwell is primarily a video artist. His work takes the form of “performance landscapes.” Actions that react to the rural or urban setting in which they take place. The body, its functions and its extensions become a working tool. Skateboarding, surfing, biking and acrobatics in all its forms are activities, forms and ways of existing, “extensions” that become the subject of videos, photographs, performances or danced works, but also paintings and drawings.
For BODY MEMORY, Gladwell is presenting an original work based on the memory of his deep childhood love for Tripitaka (the hero/heroine of the cult series Monkey, in which Masako Natsume, a sublime actress who died tragically young, plays the role of a young monk), and on poems written to her by the artist.
In early 2015, Gladwell had a double major exhibition at the University of New South Wales and the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation in Sydney, curated by Barbara Polla and Paul Ardenne.
In 2011 the artist had a solo show at the Schunck Museum in Heerlen, Netherlands, and in 2013 at the De La Warr Pavilion, UK.
His work has featured in a number of major group shows: The Power of Doubt, organised by Hou Hanru, Museo Colecciones ICO, Madrid, 2011; Paradise Lost at the Istanbul Museum of Art, in 2011; Panoramas Sud at the 17th SESC Videobrasil International Festival of Contemporary Art in São Paulo, Brazil, 2011; and in the John Kaldor Family Collection at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2011.
Shaun Gladwell represented Australia at the 53rd Venice Biennale and travelled to Afghanistan as an “Official Memorial War Artist” in 2009.
Ali Kazma
Ali Kazma was born in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1971. He lives and works in Istanbul.
After studying photography in London, Ali Kazma obtained a master’s degree in cinema at the New School, New York, in 1995.
Since 2000, Kazma’s work has consisted mainly in documenting human activities, raising fundamental questions about the importance of social organisation and work, in a series of videos titled “Obstructions,” a term which he uses to refer to human resistance to time and to death.
The characters in Kazma’s videos have real physical presence. The artist has developed an ability to “become invisible” which enables him to observe things with extreme precision. He works alone, without an assistant, and his patience is a vital ingredient in ensuring the success of his work. Using the vocabulary of cinema, Kazma bans pathos, excessive passion or compassion. The artist positions himself not as engaged but, rather, “disengaged.” This is the basis of his pictorial aesthetic.
In 2013, invited to exhibit in the Turkish Pavilion in Venice, Kazma produced a new series of videos titled “Resistances.” These videos show the body both as a way of resisting constraints (Prison, School) and uniformisation (Tattoo, Scarification), but also as a tremendous tool of appropriation (Body Builders, Body Building, Kinbaku), and a medium for the wildest dreams of technology and medicine (Anatomy, Cryonics, Eye, Laboratory, Robot).
Kazma was warded the Nam June Paik Prize in 2010 and featured in the H-Box programme by Benjamin Weil.
His works have been shown at the Venice Biennale (2013), the Istanbul Biennial (2001, 2007, 2011), Tokyo Opera City (2001), the Istanbul Modern (2004), the 9th Havana Biennale (2006), the San Francisco Art Institute (2006), the 9th Lyon Biennale (2007), at MAC Lyon (2013) and the São Paulo Bieñal (2012), among others.
Jean-Michel Pancin
Jean-Michel Pancin was born in Avignon, France, in 1971. He lives and works in Paris and Avignon.
After practising figure skating at a high level (up to the age of sixteen), Jean-Michel Pancin gained a BA in economics (Université Aix II), followed by a diploma at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.
Jean-Michel Pancin takes us on exploratory adventures and investigations. His works deal with a range of subjects, both banal and philosophical, such as landscape, prison, body memory love, being, and architecture. His approach is always singular, for his works are projects that use a variety of mediums – videos books, photographs, drawings – and involve disciplines such as archaeology, astrology, morphopsychology, and mathematics. They sometimes directly involve those concerned by the issues they address. For example, Pancin had a former inmate draw from memory the prison in Avignon.
Pancin has won several grants and photography prizes, notably the first Leica Prize in 2001.
In 2014 he featured in the exhibition La disparition des lucioles (Collection Yvon Lambert) in the old Saint-Anne prison in Avignon, and gave his first presentation of the work shown in BODY MEMORY at the LOOP art fair in Barcelona (specialising in video). This video, in which the artist puts this body memory to work by slipping on the ice skates he was forced to put away twenty years earlier for medical reasons is one of the iconic works in the exhibition at Topographie de l’Art.
In 2013 Pancin exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and in 2012, the Printemps de Septembre à Toulouse included his work on prison in the show at the Les Abattoirs museum of modern and contemporary art.
Robert Montgomery
Robert Montgomery was born in Scotland in 1972. He lives and works in London, UK. He studied at the Edinburgh College of Art and was a participant on the programme at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Texas.
Robert Montgomery is a post-Situationist poet and artist whose words and sentences are his artistic materials. Cropping up suddenly in the most unexpected places his words in neon or in flames reactivate a forgotten magic in the disquieting precision of a poem or the purifying gesture of setting alight. The artist’s works are highly diverse in their configurations (LED light sculptures, burnt sculptures, watercolours, etc.) and he usually places them in public space, in reference to the post-Situationist concern to compel public attention in a surprising way. The artist seeks to resist images with words, words that, at the very minimum, offer a return to the collective unconscious and to our own thoughts. The unit of his work is not the letter per se, nor even a word, but a constructed utterance that is sometimes enigmatic or, on the contrary, full of assertive power. Each of his works has a strong visual impact, but they are to be read essentially as poems, which are sometimes complex in their syntax, and words designed to reveal a hidden dimension of experience or consciousness. His sentences are there to convey a hidden truth, a richness ignored or masked by the ordinary flux of things, and offer the reader the possibility of a revelation, and perhaps even redemption.
Montgomery’s poetry has appeared on appropriated advertising hoardings in London and Berlin, been transformed into a shifting, luminous statement in Istanbul, burst into flames outside the Louvre in Paris, or appeared modestly in the middle of the countryside, barely visible to a few eyes on what looked like a disused chicken coop — the very antithesis of the spectacle.
Among Montgomery’s many international shows, one of the most iconic is Echoes of Voices in the High Towers (organised by Neue Berliner Raume), which took over the streets of Berlin in summer 2012. He was the first artist to have works exhibited at Tempelhof airport, which served as an SS military base during the Second World War. His installation All Palaces are Temporary Palaces was shown
at the Venice Biennale in 2011.
This catalogue was printed on the occasion of the exhibition “BODY MEMORY,” organised from 4 to 25 July 2015.
Exhibition curator: Barbara Polla
Acknowledgements
Topographie de l’Art offers special thanks to the curator of the exhibition: Barbara Polla, assisted by Clara Djian, Nicolas Leto and Nicolas Etchenagucia.
We warmly thank the artists Janet Biggs, mounir fatmi, Shaun Gladwell, Ali Kazma, Jean-Michel Pancin and Robert Montgomery.
We also think our friends and fellow galleries: Anna Jill Lüpertz (Berlin), Connersmith (Washington DC), Nev (Istanbul), Nuke (Paris), Odile Ouizeman (Paris), Sarah Schwartz (Sydney), and all the galleries who represent mounir fatmi.
The video Can’t Find My Way Home by Janet Biggs was produced with support from the Blaffer Art Museum (Houston, Texas).
The video Interceptor Deluge Sequence by Shaun Gladwell was produced with support from Gene Sherman and the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF).
Home, the video by Ali Kazma, was produced with the support of the Vehbi Koç Foundation.
© La Manufacture de l’Image for this edition.
ISBN: 978-2-36669-018-7
Colophon for Éditions La Manufacture de l’Image, June 2015