P r e s s d o s s i e r ORLAN Variable time and Medusa's Kisses ORLAN, Experimental involvement into play within art (détail), 2015 Exhibition From 11 July to 25 October 2015 Opening on 10 July at 6.30 pm Moulins Albigeois – 41 rue Porta – 81000 Albi - FRANCE From Wednesday to Sunday from 2-7 pm Curator : Jacqueline-Ruth Meyer Information : 00 33 +5 63 38 35 91 00 33 +9 63 03 98 84 [email protected] Contact press [email protected] www.centredartlelait.com ORLAN Variable time and Medusa's Kisses ORLAN. Freedom écorché and skinned ORLAN is one the greatest living French artists. In its full maturity, her oeuvre has a powerful, keen quality set within the context of major artistic and social issues. In 1964, ORLAN started questioning the status of the body and the social, cultural, political and religious pressures that are part and parcel of it. She questions scientific, technological and medical discoveries, and champions hybridization, tolerance and human rights through nomadic and changing identities. She uses different techniques: photography, video, sculpture, drawing, installations, performance, biotechnologies, augmented reality, etc. Variable time and Medusa's kisses is the first exhibition bringing together just ORLAN’s digital works and questions the notion of time in ORLAN’s work through an unprecedented selection of videos from different periods, rounded off by the production of a new interactive 3D installation which incorporates a video game. With Experimental involvement into play within art, ORLAN hji acks the codes of video games. As an artist, she reconstructs a world where the serial frageur killer is no longer the hero, and immerses visitor in the virtual action. Apart from the artistic challenge of translating the world of games into the register of art and vice versa, this work proposes to facilitate access to art through play and thus create new forms of reception and exchanges with art for the public, echoing current cultural uses and running counter to warlike and destructive stereotypes of commercial video games. Based on a proposal by Jacqueline-Ruth Meyer, curator and director of the Centre d’art Le LAIT, an initial stage of the project will take place in Albi. Devised over a long time span, in different places, it will be possible to increase or decrease its contents (and the more complex video game), depending on the particular venues playing host to it. With the support of Arcadi Île-de-France In partnership with : 2 ORLAN has turned her own body into the medium, raw material and visual tool of her work. Having become “the forum of public debate”, it questions society, and it activates and puts on the agenda forms and values which are opposed to natural, social and political determinism, to all manner of domination, religion, male supremacy, cultural segregation, and the restrictions of norms and standards... Freedom, which ORLAN regularly represents in her works through the famous gesture of the raised arm, borrowed from Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty, is both the starting point and the culmination of her quest. The integrity of her approach is only matched by the inventiveness of forms that are being ceaselessly renewed in order to broaden the power peculiar to art, the power that can “add muscle” to the imagination, hone the way people look at things, and deepen our consciousness of reality. Jackie-Ruth Meyer, curator and director of Art Center Le LAIT Liste des oeuvres présentées: - Experimental involvement into play within art, interactive 3D installation with a video game, 2015 - Self Hybridation Opéra de Pékin n°1, 2014, projection d'une image fixe (réalité augmentée avec le logiciel AUGMENT) - Freedom écorché and skinned, 2013, 3D video, 28’32” - Asil/Exil, 2011 – Asylum/Exile – 25’52” - Repère(s) Mutant(s) / Mutant Landmark(s), 2013 – 4h 59’' - Laïcite/Suture – Secularism/Suture, 2007 – 24’30” - MesuRages: - 1979, Musée de St Pierre, Lyon, France– 17'40'' - 2012, Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, USA – 52' 02'' - 2012, M HKA Museum, Antwerp, Belgium – 26' 23'' - Harlequin’s Coat, 2008, video, 29'04'' - Operation réussie, 1990, video, 6’11'' - Operation Opera, 1991, video, 9'11"" - Omnipresence, 1993 – 1 h 22' 51'' - Scan strip-tease de Bump Load, 2013 video, 12' 15'' - ORLAN Remix/ Romain Gary, Costa-Gravas, Deleuze et Guattari, 2010, video, 3'40'' - Bien que... Oui mais... – Although... Yes but..., 2003, video, 29' 59 '' - Mise en scène pour un grand Fiat, 1986, video, 21' 31'' - Sainte ORLAN and the old men, 1984, vidéo, 9' 27'' 3 Variable Time and Medusa's kisses Selected videos Freedom écorché and skinned, 2013, 3D video, 28’32” ORLAN has manufactured her 3D self-portrait in an écorché or skinned style, making use of medical imagery of the body and giving it a cyborg touch. In slow motion, this avatar takes the position of the Statue of Liberty, which ORLAN uses at the end of all her mesuRAGE performances.And in this large video projection two other avatars remake the movement of ORLAN’s body during the mesuRAGE performance, on the floor.. Asil/Exil, 2011 – Asylum/Exile – 25’52” At her exhibition Est-ce que vous êtes belge?/Are you Belgian?, ORLAN created a video tape by filming undocumented people who talked to her about the countries they had crossed. She then hybridized their flags and moved them slowly over their faces, changing the colour of their skin with colours differing from those of their origins. 4 Repère(s) Mutant(s) / Mutant Landmark(s), 2013 – 4h 59’' This video continues the work undertaken with Asylum/Exile in Belgium. Turn by turn, the video shows 24 Marseille immigrants who have just finally obtained French nationality. On a static shot of their faces, ORLAN makes hybridized flags passing transparently over their faces file past, in slow motion. This impertinent work questions nationalism and the way skin colour is accepted, because the flags, rendered transparent, colour skins and faces, so that they become at times whiter, redder, yellower, blacker... Laïcite/Suture – Secularism/Suture, 2007 – 24’30” At the Museum of Modern art in Saint-Etienne, during her retrospective held there in 2007, ORLAN started to hybridize her wardrobe, which she had had all her life. This video records the performance. ORLAN appears on stage totally hidden by a very long yardage of black fabric which crosses the entire room; she frees herself from this black veil by cutting and tearing it. Using micro-sensors, she creates a sound track. 5 MesuRages: - Musée de St Pierre, Lyon, 1979, vidéo, France– 17'40'' - Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, USA, 2012, vidéo – 52' 02'' - M HKA Museum, Antwerp, Belgium, 2012, vidéo – 26' 23'' The ORLAN-body is an instrument used for measuring both cultural institutions (Musée Saint Pierre, Guggenheim Museum, Andy Warhol Museum, M HKA Museum, Centre Pompidou...) and streets named after stars from our cultural past. For much of her life (1968-2012) ORLAN used her body, clothed and shod, to measure herself against architectures and/or spaces. The performance has a protocol, invariably the same, but used in different ways depending on the place where it unfolds. The dress (made of trousseau netting) which she uses is washed at the end of the performance and the dirty water from the dress is kept in small bottles which are labelled and sealed with wax. In these latest performances at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, USA, and the M HKA Museum in Antwerp, Belgium, ORLAN has used measuring instruments gauging the physical investment of the body during the performance, thus highlighting the body’s physical expenditure during the development of the work. Omnipresence, 1993, vidéo – 1 h 22' 51'' This is one of the most significant performances in the series Surgical-operation-performance. It is the most high-tech. ORLAN was a pioneer, not only by questioning surgery but also through the technical means she made use of. Omnipresence was transmitted by satellite to the Centre Pompidou, the Sandra Gering gallery in New York, and the McLuhan Centre in Toronto, Canada ... at a time when webcams did not yet exist. It was necessary to reserve a satellite network which was expensive and did not always work. In the operating theatre, a sign language specialist was involved, along with many assistants, as well as Connie Cheng of CNN. At the Centre Pompidou, numerous personalities held a public debate with ORLAN. She answered during the operation. This two-part video shows what happened in the operating theatre and at the Centre Pompidou. 6 Scan strip-tease de Bump Load, 2013, vidéo – 12' 15'' ORLAN not only performed a strip-tease right down to her bare bones with the help of medical imagery, but also mixed this with macro images of her own cells. She also had her skull made as a 3D printing sculpture. In this black-and-white video, ORLAN re-works her images and talks about the mutant body called Bump Load, with which she has prepared several sculptures. ORLAN Remix/Romain Gary, Costa-Gavras, Deleuze and Guattari, 2010, vidéo – 3’40” This film was commissioned from ORLAN by SOS Racisme. She chose to remix a sequence of the film, “Claire de femme”, based on the book by Romain Gary, at a moment in the film when Yves Montand is waiting for Romy Schneider, who does not turn up. Bar jokes are exchanged in which Belgians and Japanese are poked fun at... Brandishing a shaker, ORLAN advises us to hybridize ourselves and in the end makes her own cells dance on a paso-doble disk, triggered by the chimpanzee to get a pink poodle to dance. 7 Bien que..