An annual creative event at Le Fresnoy, the renowned studio national des arts contemporains de la métropole lilloise located in Tourcoing, “Panorama” offers the opportunity to discover over 50 new works in the fields of image, sound and digital creation created by resident students. Here’s our selection for this 25th edition.
Combining sculptures resembling underwater ruins with digital videos, Chinese artist Yue Cheng (b. 1995)’s installation “The World” plunges us into an underwater utopian world, that of the reappearance of prehistoric marine species in a futuristic post-industrial perspective. Bordering on science fiction, his landscapes of the abyss confront us with the abyss of destruction and dehumanisation.
No less dystopian is the audio-visual installation by Marcel Mrejen (b. 1994), which turns the Algerian desert into a virtual landscape (mixing real and unreal images), and then draws us in with its beauty: illuminated by a science-fiction artificial sun, isn’t this sightless world, swept by a sandstorm, that of “the capitalist utopia of infinite growth 1”?
FROM UTOPIA TO DYSTOPIA
To shake us out of our torpor, the sound installation by Victor Villafagne (b. 1995) spits out the sounds of explosions, gunfire and screams, mixed with snatches of nationalist anthems and top hits remixed by artificial intelligence. A formidable “acoustic weapon of mental manipulation” that will make you love the silence and gentle poetry of Circus Variations by artist, mathematician and poet Ferdinand Campos. In this impressive installation combining visual poetry and textile sculpture, we are confronted with two simulacra of mountains where snatches of poems, written during an ascent, are analysed and recomposed via a complex algorithmic system. Not far away, Brazilian artist Bianca Dacosta presents the “body of water” (Corpo d’água): facing a screen projecting images of mountains, a suspended plastic tarpaulin filled with water is visited by a virtual whitish body that appears and disappears, creating “a sensory space”, “a mineral fiction that invites us to feel our primary relationship with this element [liquid] that constitutes us 1”.
With her polymorphous “Night Stalker” environment, Sarah-Anaïs Desbenoit (b. 1992) invites visitors to “enter a meditative state through an evolving visual and aural landscape”. A sunset projected in a loop on a screen, tears/drops falling into a miniature pool, a little train turning on a circuit… the animated sculptures that make up this poetic-playful landscape are all micro-fictions capable of “transmitting a state tinged with a certain melancholy, leading us to a dreamlike, melodic wandering”.
- Quotes from the exhibition catalogue.
“PANORAMA 25“
Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains
22, rue du Fresnoy, Tourcoing
Until January 7, 2024,