Housed in a marvellous neoclassical villa built in the 1930s on the shores of Lake Lugano, surrounded by the Ticino mountains, the Fondation Bally is hosting the first solo exhibition by Saudi-American artist Sarah Brahim. Born in 1992, the artist uses video and sound installations, photographs, performances and sculptures to create a choreography of intimacy that redefines the concept of infinity.
What if eternity could “be conceived as a form of infinity in the finite world”, as “the possibility of being stopped within ourselves, in the inner experimentation of our own infinity”, asks Vittoria Matarrese, director of the Bally Foundation and curator of the exhibition entitled “Sometimes we are eternal”, in reference to two philosophical thoughts. Thus, explains the curator, Spinoza in his Ethics (1677) “asserted that the spirit cannot destroy itself with the body, and that by knowing this ‘we know by experience that we are eternal”1. Some three hundred years later, the French philosopher Alin Badiou added the word “parfois” to this proposition: “sometimes, we are eternal “2 and, thanks to this adverb, he was able to situate eternity in time. “This “sometimes” seems to indicate a sensation, a moment, and proposes a new relationship between the finite and the infinite, between universal truths and particular bodies. “
Fusion
It is these interstices between universal sensations and particular bodies, between temporalities too (past-present, finite-infinite), but also between the “intrabody” and the surrounding universe, that Sarah Brahim has chosen to explore in her choreographies of time. Trained as a dancer, she “gives her works the appearance of a pas de deux, of an intimate dialogue […] between [herself] and her otherness, where the form of the exchange retains liquid contours”, those where, through the choreographed gestures, the inner body and the outer body (which feels, touches and sees), her body and the body of the other, mingle and intermingle through the fluidity of gesture.
Duet With Time
Walking, breathing, rising, falling, caressing a wall… through “simple choreographies”, Sarah Brahim weaves links between inside and outside, here and far away, the palpable and the impalpable, to the point of being in osmosis with architecture and nature. A heir to the dancers of the 60s and 70s, she sees the body as a medium, “dance as a heightened experience of life, a search for symbiosis of body, consciousness and environment”. Two photographs, one of two hands clasped in the horizon, the other of a body on a beach, bear witness to this search for fusion, for a sense of unity. The body’s quest for integration with the landscape, while the omnipresent water (notably through the open architecture) appears as a metaphor for this union. Scandalised by sound scores (two stones rubbed together, crackling or whispering…), this quest for union (here, with the earth, there, with the sky, via repetitive ascensions) seems to want to abolish time. Like Sisyphus tirelessly ascending and descending his mountain, the two performers in the multi-screen video installation Duet with time give their upward choreography the appearance of a ritual through the mechanics of repetition. Just as the two levitating bodies in the video installation I like never, I also like ever, or the extremely slow walk along the ocean’s edge in his Adagio, filmed to the rhythm of his breathing, the camera placed on his diaphragm, for the ebb and flow of water not only sustains our own bodies, but also connects them to other bodies, to other worlds beyond our human selves. 3
Ethics, Spinoza, proposition 23
Sometimes we are eternal, Alain Badiou, Nick Nesbitt, Kenneth Reinhard, Jana Ndiaye Berankova. Edited by Jana Ndiaye Berankova and Norma Hussey, Suture Press
Bodies of water, Astrida Neimanis, Bloomsbury Publishing.
“Sarah Brahim – Sometimes, we are eternal”
Until April 28
Bally Foundation
Villa Heleneum
Via Cortivo 26, 6976 Lugano
https://www.ballyfoundation.ch/fr
SWITZERLAND – LUGANO