Région Sud Art Prize : Marine Pistien
At what distance does a body stop being recognizable? Marine Pistien’s images push right up to that limit. In an overly close close-up. In a fragment of skin turned almost into landscape. In a blurred image that hesitates. Very quickly, we no longer quite know what we’re looking at. An arm, a nape, a breath, a shadow? Her photographs install this uncertainty — not to make their subject disappear, but to suspend the reflexes that let us identify it in a single glance.
Framing thus becomes a tool of revelation. Isolating a detail, changing its scale, repeating it: these gestures alone are enough to transform the way we see. The close-up doesn’t just enlarge — it changes the nature of what’s shown. In her video Pulsations, skin can take on the scope of a panorama, its surface that of a landscape relief. Little by little, the photograph stops being a document and becomes a space for observation, one in which time seems to slow and attention reorganizes itself.
Watching her work, one quickly understands that an image is never a given. Marine tries an enormous amount. She changes a format, goes back to the previous one, prints on different paper, reframes, starts over, enlarges, shrinks, shifts things by a few centimeters. Solutions rarely arrive in a single gesture. They emerge from a succession of attempts, as though each work first had to exhaust several possibilities before finding its definitive form.
Susan Sontag saw in photography a practice that often establishes a relationship of distance — sometimes voyeuristic — toward what is being looked at. Marine’s works produce almost the opposite effect. By narrowing the field of vision, they make presence denser. The fragment doesn’t reduce the body to a mere part of itself. The eye hesitates, comes back, accepts not understanding right away. This slight loss of bearings opens onto an unfamiliar horizon, where perception remains held in balance.
This experience carries over into her installations. The “image-cabins,” as Marine likes to call them, don’t simply present photographs: they compose situations. Small and large formats, videos, objects, series, or latent archives build an environment through which one moves as much with one’s body as with one’s attention. The exhibition space traces out a temporary refuge, but also a place of passage, where interior and exterior, protection and vulnerability, coexist.
“Every movement is survival,” she writes. This phrase runs quietly through her entire body of work, which does not seek to produce a visual shock. It asks instead for a different quality of visit, one facing what she calls Le poids des images (The Weight of Images). The longer one spends in front of them, the more weight these same prints gain. Empathy is not born here of immediate recognition, but of availability. Before knowing exactly what one is looking at, one has to accept staying a little longer with the works. That, perhaps, is where the encounter with the other begins.
Pierre-Antoine Lalande
Bio
Marine Pistien is a visual artist. She graduated from the École nationale supérieure de la photographie in Arles (2021). She lives and works in Marseille.
She develops a practice of image-making and installation in which movement appears as a condition of survival, and the body as a point of anchorage and resistance. Her works explore states of tipping, vertigo, and disruption in spaces where the image forms between stillness and movement.
Her immersive installations, which she calls “image-shelters,” propose spaces of suspension and breathing, and question the ways of inhabiting a fragile world, between interior and exterior, real and imaginary.
Her work has been presented notably at the Immix gallery in Paris, as well as in several group exhibitions in Arles and Marseille. She has undertaken artistic residencies, notably at Le Couvent in Marseille, and creation and transmission residencies as part of programmes such as Rouvrir le monde and Création en cours. She also develops pedagogical and collaborative projects.
In 2025, she was awarded the Biennale de l’image tangible prize and exhibited at the Espace Niemeyer in Paris.
