All by my selfie
Born in 1972, Abraham Poincheval has an insatiable desire for exploration. The voyages he undertakes necessitate a complete engagement of both body and mind and lead him to experience altered states of consciousness. Either itinerant or static, his expeditions go against any logic of territorial expansion. His liveable sculptures presented in the exhibition are laboratories, on or within which the artist experiences time, enclosure or the gradual loss of a sense of reality. These vessels seem to have come straight from a child’s drawing. They welcome the performer, disturb the landscape and exist through the stories of passers-by.
This human-sized bottle looks like a child's dream, with its cork-shaped entrance door and sunshade label. Abraham Poincheval created it in 2015 to follow the trajectory of the river Rhône from its mouth in the Camargue to the edge of the glacier where it has its source. At each step, the artist camped alone for almost a week in his unusual vessel, stranded in a park, on a beach or in front of a museum. The inhabited sculpture introduces a dreamlike dimension into the landscape and echoes the mythical bottles with messages thrown into the sea. "It creates an interface between the people who pass by" and the artist. Over the course of days, encounters and discussions, the transparent interior blends into its environment.
Galerie Semiose, Paris, 2016