Praz-Dellavalade, Paris / Los Angeles
Soufiane Ababri, Genevieve Gaignard, Fabien Mérelle, Julien Nedelec
For this year’s edition of Art-o-Rama, Praz-Delavallade proposes a collective booth of their most diverse and younger generation artists Soufiane Ababri, Genevieve Gaignard, Fabien Mérelle and Julien Nédelec.
Soufiane Ababri’s entire body of work produces a militant discourse and this leads to a performative approach inspired by certain forms of resistance seen in the Afro-American and gay movements, a form of empowerment thanks to which these movements’ members took what was considered as a failing and turned it to their advantage.
The political tension of “otherness”, dichotomy of dominated and dominating also plays a role in Genevieve Gaignards work. She positions her own female body as the chief site of exploration – challenging viewers to navigate the powers and anxieties of intersectional identity.
Born and raised in Massachussets, Gaignard mines social media culture for cues to stage her photographs, transforming herself as various archetypes of women.
The Idea of seeing, an artist that observes a world that observes him in a form of introspection combining his own unique perception, also plays a poignant role in Fabien Mérelle’s Works. His portrayal of the artist in everyday life, a mise en scène of what happens within the confines of a place of leisure, a workplace, a place for creating or within a personal and intimate space, is strongly influenced by, «The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life» by Erving Goffman.
Within ideas of roles and masks Julien Nédélec unravels symbols and questions representation by juggling with language, images and sound in a transpositional game whose codes he controls.
Hardly surprising seeing as they are his own roles and codes, because he invents the rules, often empirical ones, that play with existing limits. There is nothing he likes more than creating multiple interpretations of his work, those that are planned from the start to which he adds others. In so doing, he proves that both images and their signifiers are actions and not just decorative objects or illusory interpretations.
The otherness, dichotomies in the every day life, Masks and roles – what our booth unites is not only a spectrum of current conflicts and discourses of younger generation artists, but is moreover representative of the wide spectrum of positions, media and artists that Praz-Delavallade reunites.
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