This exhibition offers a landscape made of bodies and voices. Through photographs of a few women's nudes and of their living spaces, Simone Simon offers…
This exhibition offers a landscape made of bodies and voices. Through photographs of a few women's nudes and of their living spaces, Simone Simon offers testimonies and draws a map of emotions in which nudity remains in the background, allowing a redefinition of intimacy to emerge. The spread of new technologies seems to offer spaces not only for exposing oneself, but also for “exhibiting oneself” and unveiling intimate life: in the accelerated rhythm of the self-portrait through the selfie, the immediate sharing on social networks, and the shift in the relation between private and public within the control devices imposed by our societies. The women who posed nude before Simone Simon's lens offer reflections that are sometimes existential, sometimes aesthetic, sometimes brutal. They recount their struggle to be fully themselves, reclaiming the temporality of a narrative and of an exchange which, with nudity, redefines another vision of the world. The portraits made by the artist are thus built through images, texts and voices, to restore with these media a dimension proper to intimacy and its floating contours. Against the proposition of a society that seems to unveil everything in transparency, the narrative offered by Simone Simon provides an intimacy made of the unsaid, a constellation of meanings, uncertain sharing and dialogues in the making. In this way the artist offers us a reflection on the media and the temporalities of the exchanges that define our territories of intimacy. The philosopher Chiara Palermo, curator of the exhibition, will be present at the private view at Galerie Eva Vautier in Nice, alongside Simone Simon, on 27 September 2019. A photographer by trade, Simone Simon has for fifteen years developed an artistic practice combining photography, video, sound recordings and written testimonies. Each of her projects is built pragmatically, to render a raw, often poetic reality. Rooted in a social, even anthropological, approach, Simone Simon seeks in the subjects she captures a living testimony, a realism touching on the lives of women in the suburbs (Les portes du Saint-Pierre, éd. Le Passager Clandestin), on the world of boxing (Boxing club, short film), on anonymous people (Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers…), on absence and abandonment (Souriez on se détruit, Ainsi va la lumière), and on childhood memories (Ne regardez pas le renard passer). Curator Chiara Palermo. Presentation and signing of the book NU, Simone Simon. Foreword by David Le Breton, text by Chiara Palermo. Exhibition view Corps Voix Territoires de l'intime, Simone Simon Sep 2019, Photo © François Fernandez. With the book NU and the exhibition CORPS / VOIX Territoires de l’intime, the artist brings together some thirty testimonies from women in their often strained relationship with their bodies. Posing nude in a setting that is intimate to them, these anonymous women affirm their complexity. The spaces and words extend the narrative given by…
