19 March 2022 -
26 June 2022
All by my selfie - a nod to the title of Nan Goldin's slide installation - brings together a body of some of the most iconic works in the Frac's collection. It evokes a time in the not so distant past, before the advent of social media, when imperfection, joy, intimacy and humour still held a vital place in the relationship we have with ourselves. Through the wide variety of works on display, we rediscover humanity stripped bare of artifice, free from the vain quest for illusory perfection.
Olga Adorno, Joël Bartoloméo, Balthasar Burkhard, Bernard Descamps, Marie Ducaté, Bernard Dufour, Camille Fallet, Nan Goldin, Guy Limone, Anna Malagrida, Martin Parr, Marc Pataut, Mathieu Pernot, Abraham Poincheval, Philippe Ramette, Nicolas Rubinstein, Sam Samore, David Shrigley and Djamel Tatah.
We are no longer able to look at ourselves honestly, editing, polishing and displaying our photos through the filters of an ever more advanced and ever more accessible technology. We have become in effect our own designers, on some crazed mission to create a face and body that could not exist in reality. Slaves to our fantasies, preferring lies to truth, we cheat our cameras of their very purpose: the images are captured by them only to be cut, edited or filtered as many times as it takes to satisfy this fictitious vision of the world we have come to have, denying in essence what is really there and who we ourselves really are. Admiring our perfected images in our phone screens, we have become our own false idols. Even living flesh is no longer permitted; wrinkles, defects, accidents of any kind are inadmissible. Yet, our obsession with perfection runs contrary to the very idea of love, this reconstruction of an image feeds on and is born from self-hatred. And thus, history repeats itself yet again. We are willing participants in our own erasure, each new selfie cancelling out the previous one. We thought we were improving ourselves, or at the very least rendering ourselves acceptable, yet these ever-multiplying, touched up images have something of the monstrous in them; in distorting what is real, they have distorted our humanity. Previously we were subjects and now we have become objects. Only a few years seperate this from the other way of taking photographs, an innocent and gentle way, free and imbued with feeling. Such practice is of a bygone era, but is yet something that we must discover again in order to discover ourselves as we really are. We appeared in the image such as we were in reality, barefaced and naked in our doubts and loneliness, troubles and worries. Bodies and faces were open, revealing what was within, all the mysteries, complexities, shadows and lights and that utter giddiness that sets us apart. Even when blurred, this photography captured the invisible, froze it and showed us what we no longer want to see, are no longer capable of even recognising and above all what we refuse to take pride in: that strange and wild part of us. We who wished to become gods and goddesses, let us now become men and women, who stumble, fall and get up again. This time, that seems far away and yet so close to us shows how unique and irreplaceable we are, it is both witness and testament to the only beauty there is: the beauty of chaos, that of a life which runs and runs without ever stopping.
Nina Bouraoui, February, 2022
This exhibition is open from Wednesday to Saturday from 12 - 6pm.
For more information please contact: expositions@gallifet.com
#AllByMySelfie
@GallifetAixenProvence
@Frac_Provencealpescotedazur
