Filming Bodies

An essential and particularly rich aspect of contemporary creation, video became an artistic medium in its own right in the 1960s. This practice developed at a time when images and their profusion were a growing and still very topical issue, in an era marked by an almost compulsive relationship with screens and the emergence of new modes of image production. Artists have turned it into a protean art form, exploring its aesthetic/plastic as well as social and political dimensions/scope. Les Abattoirs invites you to explore this medium through a dedicated programme, in partnership with the Centre National des Arts Plastiques. Without claiming to retrace the history of this medium, the aim is to explore this collection through as many different approaches, narratives, filmed objects, image treatments and techniques as there are.

This first presentation explores the work of artists who use the body to produce a social and political commentary on our society. The body speaks to the world. Through its movements, transformations, artifices, hollows and protrusions, it reflects the changes and vibrations of eras and societies. The artists gathered here capture the body, whole or in fragments, organic or synthetic, with a formal inventiveness that combines the codes of performance, cinema, documentary and even video games. In these multiple forms, each artist places the body in front of the camera to better bring out the stories and symbols it conveys: the memory of slavery in Lorna Simpson's work, the vulnerability of bodies in Kate Cooper's, and the affirmation of female pleasure in Nil Yalter's. Among these representations, the motif of the mouth appears repeatedly, as in the work of Lily Renaud Deward and Adriana Garcia Galan, the latter embodying a borderline space between the intimate and the public, where systems of domination and strategies of struggle are played out.