Romain Gandolphe: DIRE OÙ J’ÉTAIS M’EST IMPOSSIBLE (TO SAY WHERE I WAS IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME)

May 5th — June 11th, 2022

Opening : Thursday May 5th — 5:30 pm

Composed of a video and a series of images, the exhibition is articulated around a trip the artist made to the Northwest Territories. In the footsteps of Lucy R. Lippard and the artists who had accompanied her, Gandolphe went to Inuvik to produce and document ephemeral and invisible art works. There he spent a week searching for traces of these works, impossible traces, since the works had been ephemeral.
 
Returning to Inuvik fifty years after Lippard, Gandolphe found and met the people of the town. He was struck by the glaring inequalities between the indigenous population and the white people who had recently come to the region, inequalities that some people seem to have unconsciously decided not to see. In Inuvik, then, it wasn’t just the works that had become invisible.

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First interested by things of the world that cannot be seen, Romain Gandolphe has developed a performance practice—and by extension, a video practice—based on the spoken word, attempting to breathe life into the unseen solely through word and gesture. Questions of memory and transmission inevitably come into play. Cognitive biases then show up: what do we make invisible without even realizing it?

The project À perte de vue (Out of Sight) was selected by the patronage commission of the Fondation des Artistes.

Photo Credit: Guy L’Heureux