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Ciel variable Art, photo, médias, culture

Yto Barrada, Beaux Gestes, Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art in partnership with A Space Gallery, , May–July, 2015 Blake Fitzpatrick

Si loin, si proche Far Away, So Close Numéro 102, hiver 2016

URI : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/80267ac

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Éditeur(s) Les Productions Ciel variable

ISSN 1711-7682 (imprimé) 1923-8932 (numérique)

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Citer ce compte rendu Fitzpatrick, B. (2016). Compte rendu de [Yto Barrada, Beaux Gestes, Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art in partnership with A Space Gallery, Toronto, May–July, 2015]. Ciel variable, (102), 89–90.

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Cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l’Université de Montréal, l’Université Laval et l’Université du Québec à Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ de la prise de vue, souci du détail, Le livre photographique, autre il était difficile pour la commissaire « de ces trois photographes, l’accumulation puissance émotive, parcours dans le incontournable dans leur travail, a pris ne pas voir le travail de chacun à travers inépuisable de documents, qu’ils soient paysage urbain ou dans l’espace intime une telle importance qu’il aura eu des le filtre du travail des autres ». À cet tirés du quotidien ou d’archives publi­ forment un lexique fait d’enchaînements résonances décisives sur le dispositif égard, le choix de former des triptyques ques, de même que l’acte spontané, en continu et d’allers-retours qui a ma- séquentiel, voire narratif et essentiel­ (réunis dans une même salle) jumelant voire banal de la prise de vue pourraient nifestement défié le temps. Un lexique lement non linéaire de leurs corpus côte à côte les trois photographes est certes correspondre à certaines modali- qui s’est densifié dans la durée, accusant respectifs. On notera par ailleurs que fort à propos et éloquent. Les similitudes tés liées au courant post-photographique. une propension à la collecte compulsive les trois projets centraux de l’exposition (texture, ombres et lumière, surimposi- En même temps, la présence sensible d’images personnelles et publiques, ont chacun été conçus en fonction d’un tion, etc.) apparaissent avec plus d’évi- de soi dans la construction d’un récit, la accumulant les surfaces réfléchissantes, livre photographique. dence, au point de confondre l’apparte- qualité esthétique des épreuves photo, les permutations temporelles et les ren- Bien sûr, Campeau, Carrière et nance des images, sauf peut-être pour la signature affirmée de l’auteur, les ves- contres insolites et poétiques (Carrière, Clément ont emprunté des voies dis- celles de Campeau, quoique son humour tiges de l’histoire et de la mémoire dans Clément) ou multipliant les signes- tinctes. Or, leur amitié professionnelle et ses figures frontales arrivent à teinter la trame du présent font ici contrepoids, témoins liés à la nature même de la de longue date ayant inévitablement les œuvres de ses compagnons. mais sans être contradictoires pour photographie (Campeau). contaminé leurs images personnelles, Le virage numérique qu’ont pris autant, aux transformations que subit le médium à l’ère de la photo amateur. Au regard du travail de ces trois photo- graphes, « il n’existe pas de remplace- ment, pas de “post”, écrit la commis- saire, seulement une accumulation sans fin ». L’exposition en fait la très belle démonstration. — — Mona Hakim est historienne de l’art, critique et commissaire indépendante. Elle a enseigné l’histoire de l’art et l’histoire de la photographie au collégial de 1996 à 2015. Ses recherches et ses écrits portent sur l’art contemporain et actuel avec un intérêt plus soutenu pour les enjeux liés à la photographie. Elle organise des expositions rétrospectives et collectives, ici comme à l’étranger, et travaille actuellement en co-commissariat sur une exposition traçant les grandes lignes de la photographie qué- bécoise depuis les quinze dernières années. — —

Babillard (détail), archives photographiques provenant de la collection personnelle des trois artistes, photo : Guy L’Heureux

to the local and, in solidarity with the collection of maps, photographs, Yto Barrada indigenous, draws our attention to minor and encyclopedic entries of local flora Beaux Gestes sites of resistance in a transitional and fauna. A hand-drawn title poster Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art geopolitical landscape. proclaiming “A Modest Proposal to in partnership with A Space Gallery, Toronto In this dual-venue exhibition, a mix Modernize Morocco and Maximize Its May–July, 2015 of video installations, photographs, and Efficiency” satirically comments upon posters combine to produce a parallel and undermines notions of progress that depiction of a city that is itself composed are driving an increasingly privatized of fragments, loosely associated pieces, and internationalized country at odds The rupturing effects of global change – from Africa to . Barrada’s exhi­ and contradictions. As Hamza Walker with the traditional market economy as epitomized recently by news stories bition Beaux Gestes, presented by the writes in the issue of Prefix Photo that depicted in the nearby documentary about migrants in over-crowded boats, Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art accompanies the exhibition, “Barrada’s photograph, Sheep Market Day. In this with bodies on deck, in the hull, and and A Space Gallery in Toronto during images, as much as they are about a component of the exhibition, intelli- in the sea – come to roost at the local the Scotiabank Contact Photography place, are also a portrait of a condi- gently curated by Scott McLeod and level, where the risks of globalization Festival, interprets the effects of mod- tion.”3 Vicky Moufawad-Paul, the juxtaposition are most exposed but also potentially ernization and the global economy on The range of image modes evident of these works extends a critical dia- transformed through acts of resistance. locality. In her photographic and video at Prefix included a film transferred to logue between various images of the Artist Yto Barrada works in , work, Barrada turns her camera to the video, Hand-Me-Downs (2011); a single region and diverse media forms. Morocco, a city located on the North vernacular, finding in vacant lots, play- colour photograph, Sheep Market Day, The aforementioned Hand-Me- African coast at the western entrance grounds, palm trees, and the indigenous Val Fleuri (2007); and a series of fifteen Downs (2011) is a filmic installation of to the Strait of Gibraltar, what Barrada botany of the region a range of subjects posters titled A Modest Proposal (2010). narrated footage from the 1950 to the calls “a jumping-off place”1 in the global with which to invent a visual “grammar Childlike in execution, the posters 1970s drawn from the Cinémémoire, flow of the dispossessed travelling north of Tangier.”2 She pays quiet attention reference the region in an idiosyncratic a Marseille-based archive of amateur

ciEL VARIABLE N­° 102 89 films from former French colonies. in putting a halt on time. Acts of Barrada’s reference to the hand-me- resistance are often hopeful gestures. down speaks not only of clothes passed In this case, the hope is that change down from one generation to the next can be negotiated, that the process can but of family stories passed down as be slowed, and that the tree as witness well. In a playful way, the work quotes will survive. the autobiographic conventions of home — — movies and the film essay as fifteen 1 Yto Barrada and Jennifer Higgie, “Talking numbered chapters unfold, held together Pictures,” Frieze (2011), http://www.frieze.com/ issue/print_article/talking-pictures/. 2 Ibid. by Barrada’s voiceover. In a voice of 3 Hamza Walker, “Beaux Gestes: On the recollection, informed by her mother’s Photographs of Yto Barrada,” Prefix Photo, childhood and connected to a series no. 31 (May 2015): 48. 4 Barrada and Higgie, of darkly humorous, even sardonic epi- “Talking Pictures.” — — sodes, unverifiable stories of familial is a photographer, events are tied to disparate film frag- Blake Fitzpatrick curator, and writer and a professor in the ments from a colonial past. As viewers, School of Image Arts at Ryerson University. we seek to find a connection between His research interests include the photo- word and image, a desire that Barrada graphic representation of the nuclear era, both loosely fulfils and confounds. Per- visual responses to contemporary militar- haps what is revealed in this piece is not Installation view of Playground, 2010, photo : Toni Hafkenscheid ism, and the history, memory, and mobility only our vulnerability to the seduction of the Wall. His curatorial projects of cinematic narration but a provoked on green grass are suspended in sleep; iris as one of Tangier’s native plants: the examine the representation of war and failure within the form to build an illu- men dig in the soil to plant seedlings; flower is seen in pastoral fields as well conflict in documentary photography, and sionistic whole out of the isolated frag- and sheep graze in fields that are dotted as in unregulated spaces, rooted next to his writings and visual works have been ments of contemporary life as cast with the vivid blue of wild irises framed roadways and housing projects, holding published and exhibited in Canada and apart by colonial history. by construction sites and concrete build- on at the edge of encroaching urbaniza- Europe. The component of the exhibition ings. An eerie quietude hangs over the tion. As symbol, the iris is a witness to — — at A Space Gallery included Playground work, as the loss of sound and the depic- change, its survival an act of resistance. (2010), a three-channel 16 mm film tion of filmic devices, including the film Botany and what Barrada calls “strat- transferred to video; images from the gage and scratched emulsion, draw a egies of resistance”4 mix most explicitly photographic series Iris Tingitana (2007); parallel between an obsolescent record- in Beaux Gestes (2009). The piece begins and Beaux Gestes (2009), a three-minute ing technology and the transformation with an aerial shot of the city and the single-channel 16 mm film transferred of the local in a landscape earmarked patchwork of vacant lots that rim its to video. Playground (2010) is a silent, for redevelopment. Barrada refuses perimeter. At ground level, a group twenty-one-minute video installation viewers the comfort of nostalgia, in- of men attend to a palm tree with a that unfolds across three screens, de- sisting that we regard the traces of the deep cut at its base. The cut has been picting a compendium of quotidian acts indigenous as survivors in a politically intentionally inflicted on the tree by a in transitional spaces. The choice of a charged landscape. These tensions are developer, who is unable to build on the multi-channel projection is important as apparent in the photographic series Iris land while the tree is alive. The men are it calls for a type of ambient spectator- Tingitana (2007), in which deceptively engaged in an act of preservation aimed ship, not directed to a particular image ambiguous photographs are composed at staving off the ravages of urban de- in time. Here, children play in a make- specifically to direct attention to what velopment. The act is one of resistance, shift playground; anonymous bodies might next be lost. The focus is on the and it parallels the work of the camera

Installation view of A Modest Proposal, 2010–2013, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg, Beirut, photo : Toni Hafkenscheid

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