Yosef Joseph Dadoune
Des Racines
Jean-Baptiste Warluzel
Deux tiers, un tiers
Exposition 2018, Past
Du 13 mars au 26 mai 2018
Vernissage le 12 mars à 18h.
L’œuvre de Joseph Dadoune est profondément marquée par le questionnement et le dépassement des frontières — que ce soit celles qui séparent l’Orient de l’Occident, le pouvoir central de la périphérie, ou l’imaginaire du réel. À la confluence de la vidéo, de la photographie, de l’architecture et du dessin, sa recherche mêle à la pratique artistique l’engagement social et la réflexion métaphysique. Parmi ses œuvres marquantes, on retiendra son film Sion (2006-2007), produit par le musée du Louvre avec l’actrice Ronit Elkabetz ; Impossible Calendars (2013) exposé notamment au Musée de Tel-Aviv lors de la célébration du centenaire de Dada ; et, plus récemment, Barrière Protectrice (2017), un ensemble de dessins autobiographiques de guerre, réunis dans une publication aux Éditions Arnaud Bizalion.
Yosef Joseph Dadoune
Roots
and Jean-Baptiste Warluzel
Two thirds, one third
Exhibition from March 13 to May 26, 2018
Yosef Joseph Dadoune, Lost in the sea / Find / Forget, 2017
Joseph Dadoune ‘s work is deeply marked by the questioning and overcoming of borders – whether they separate the East from the West, the central power from the periphery, or the imaginary from the real. At the confluence of video, photography, architecture and drawing, his research mixes artistic practice with social engagement and metaphysical reflection. Among his outstanding works, we will remember his film Sion (2006-2007), produced by the Louvre Museum with actress Ronit Elkabetz; Impossible Calendars (2013) exhibited notably at the Tel Aviv Museum during the celebration of the centenary of Dada; and, more recently, Protective Barrier (2017), a set of autobiographical war drawings, collected in a publication by Éditions Arnaud Bizalion.
Yosef Joseph Dadoune, Hannah Arendt Poems, exhibition view © François Fernandez
Poems Hannah Arendt
Colored oil pastel on Hänemhule paper 190 gr
84.1 cm x 59.4 cm
Series of 43 drawings
The archetype of a letter changes into a spot or a line. The use of German, which I don’t speak, allows me to project myself elsewhere, to be someone else. Another language is then established. The loves found in Hannah Arendt’s poems become sometimes flowers, sometimes writings metamorphosed into solar wheat, sometimes titles: You and Me. Me and You, the double arrows, refer to the comings and goings of yellow or pink springs, to the subjectivity of lovers lying in fields of wheat, to extra-solar landscapes. Geographical and temporal landmarks are erased and give way to a white and “sonorous” background, on which traumas and memories are inscribed.
Yosef Joseph Dadoune, Flowers / After War. Blind Spot, 2015-2016, exhibition view © François Fernandez
Flowers / After War. Blind Spot / Tel Aviv, 2015-2016
Suite of 36 black oil pastels on paper
I made these pastels in my studio, in the south of Tel Aviv, the neighborhood of Eritrean refugees that faces the towers of the wealthy “Gated Communities”. The girls and boys who died at the whim of the gods in Ovid become flowers or trees, recalling the metaphors of the wreaths of flowers woven by the Romans for their dead. Flowers / After War. Blind Spot are these flowers blackened by physical and political pollution. Their greased iron rods, their “legs” and their roots are like the bases on which anti-rocket missiles are fixed. They are vertical beauties; seen from afar, they form a field of black hybrid flowers where the feminine and masculine play the game of seduction.
Yosef Joseph Dadoune, Lost memory : Blind spot, 2017, exhibition view © François Fernandez
Flowers / After War. Blind Spot / Tel Aviv, 2015-2016
Suite of 36 black oil pastels on paper
I made these pastels in my studio, in the south of Tel Aviv, the neighborhood of Eritrean refugees that faces the towers of the wealthy “Gated Communities”. The girls and boys who died at the whim of the gods in Ovid become flowers or trees, recalling the metaphors of the wreaths of flowers woven by the Romans for their dead. Flowers / After War. Blind Spot are these flowers blackened by physical and political pollution. Their greased iron rods, their “legs” and their roots are like the bases on which anti-rocket missiles are fixed. They are vertical beauties; seen from afar, they form a field of black hybrid flowers where the feminine and masculine play the game of seduction.
Jean-Baptiste Warluzel, Two Thirds One Third, 2018
Video and sound installation, HD video 40 min, independent stereo sound 15 min
He considers video and sound as a way of thinking that allows him to question the world of the show and the exhibition. Through rearrangements, compositions and repeats, he creates his images by questioning the action of the performer, the documentarian and the author.
He regularly produces video projections for the Salerno Opera in Italy, and exhibits his work in various exhibition venues (Palais de Tokyo for the D’Days, Petach Tikva Museum in Israel for the Bibliogia exhibition).
He has been collaborating for three years with the choreographer Régine Chopinot and teaches at the Toulon Provence Méditerranée School of Art and Design.
In praise of the invisible
In May 2008 Jean-Baptiste Warluzel and a journalist friend left for Sichuan with the intention of reporting on a major earthquake that had occurred two months earlier, killing eighty thousand people in the mountainous region near the regional capital Chengdu. This report was a failure insofar as the Chinese authorities, determined to conceal this human catastrophe in the midst of preparations for the Beijing Olympic Games, had forbidden all access to the area of destruction and strictly controlled the testimony of the displaced populations and the survivors of this tragedy.
Ten years later, JBW took back the images shot on the spot under the pressure of the police ban to reformulate in the field of art the impossibility of the initial reportage. To do this, he chose to juxtapose the rushes of his image capture in the chronological order of their shooting, without any other form of editing. He then superimposed on these sequences of images, in voice-over, the indications of the general plan of the reportage, making us hear the logical construction that should have given its documentary consistency to the final project. By putting in evidence, in his resumption, this disarticulation between the stated program and the succession of the images that he gives us to see, the artist installs us in a situation of perceptive strangeness that de-realizes the objectivity of the filmic document and confers to him a particular poetic autonomy.
This operation is based on a deconstruction of the informative linearity of the documentary form to deliver to us, gravitating around the screen of invisibility which hides the reality of the catastrophe, the peripheral echoes, alternately silent or crossed by contradictory information. The resulting fragmentary visual narrative is determined by the chaotic tempo imposed by the search for testimony under the omnipresent constraint of censorship. By revealing in this way, from the raw material accumulated in the action of filming, the impossibility of accessing any visual reality of this tragedy, he also designates it as the inaccessible center of his desire of representation. The symbolic dynamic that he puts into action then exceeds the denunciation of the political censorship of which he is a victim as a documentary filmmaker to reach a more general questioning on the translational value of the image in relation to the reality of which it is supposed to account.
In this particular context, where the object of the reportage is removed and therefore no longer constitutes the focal point of the story, Jean-Baptiste Warluzel seizes on this impediment to invent a new form of narrative freed from any demonstrative intention. He then makes the visual signifiers of this autonomy shimmer in a filmed wandering whose descriptive acuity and syncopated rhythm, built on the margins of the invisible, deploy the intensity of the camera’s specular spells and its paradoxical impotence to capture the essence of reality.
Jean-Marc Réol February 2018