- Exhibition program
- Cycle: Once upon a time?
- Author
- Maïder Fortuné
- Dates
- —
- Curated by
- Marie-Thérèse Champesme i Pascale Pronnier
Born in 1973 in Toulouse (France)
Lives and works in Paris
A former student of the Jacques Lecoq Drama School, Maïder Fortuné founded her own theatre company before devoting herself mainly to performance and video. The stage taught her the importance of the gesture in space, a concern for its rhythm and precision; it showed her the power of silence and of the light that sculpts bodies, draws them out of the shadows or dispatches them to invisibility. Video allows her to capture tenuous movements, to stretch out time and, through slow-motion and montage, to create strange mutating bodies whose movements exercise a hypnotic fascination over the viewer.
In Slak (2002), the bodies “cross the black”. No background, no set links them to a particular context. They seem to be out of space and time, emerging from the shadows where they will no doubt return, figures from some mythological tale. In them the individual has disappeared; they are merely carnal mass, form in free movement given over to an incessant metamorphosis.
The arrangement of the installation, carefully chosen by the artist, places the viewer’s body at the centre of this fictional space.
Watching the videos where Maïder Fortuné stages herself, we are confronted by a disturbing, ambiguous evocation of childhood, an image of a little girl playing innocent games which gradually gives way to a nightmare vision. In Totem (2001), the body seems to be caught in a dizzy, never-ending movement, and the face is subjected to a disturbing decomposition. Maïder Fortuné’s imaginary leads us here to the borders of the fantastic. Through the looking-glass, Alice has a date with ghosts…
