Alexandre Maubert – ENSP 2009
Alexandre Maubert’s work plays with a process of permanent deterritorialisation. From film to installation, photography to new media, his images constantly oscillate between diverse boundaries (geographic and aesthetic), as though to better invalidate or affirm them. The important element of these forms is that they function like so many contortions allowing the artist to approach a complex and diffuse subject, which is that of our utopias, their limits, and the manner in which these utopias resist reality. But the utopias that he questions are troubling in that they often flirt with the limits of imprisonment, and sometimes even those of legality. From Nordelta, a gated community near Buenos Aires, to the ubiquitous city of New Songdo, located in South Korea, his works never stop tracing the moving outlines of a collective dream and its reverse. To grasp hold of these dreams and illusions, the artist relentlessly explores new modes of representation made possible by current technologies. The critical distance with which he questions these communal fantasies is often doubled by a second issue, artistic in this case, that of a different representation, capable of showing the implicit. GPS coordinates that allow the demarcation of the symbolic enclosure of an open-air prison (Casabianda), seismographic curves that allow the inference of a natural disaster (Cutting Plane), interactivity that allows the spectator to be immersed in a strange place to which he will never have access (Monade) Here, each new subject seems to be the opportunity to imagine new ways of capturing the transformations of our society. What is enduringly affecting about these works is that, although his intention has a commitment as subtle as it is steadfast, we nevertheless find the jubilation of produced fiction, a mise en scène. In fact, where we could expect a kind of documentary rigour, Alexandre Maubert manages to inject into our actuality an allegorical questioning about past mythologies and those to come.
Gregory Buchert
Alexandre Maubert
Alexandre Maubert
Born in 1981 in Lyon. Lives and works in Paris. Alexandre Maubert is a French filmmaker and visual artist. After graduating from the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie of Arles, he went on to study at Le Fresnoy between 2009 and 2011. His works are now presented in many institutions, galleries and festivals worldwide: Arte Laguna, Venetian Arsenal, Nuit Blanche Kyoto, Kassel Film Festival, Über Lebenskunst, Berlin; New York Photo Festival, Tish Gallery, New York; Foam Museum, Maison Descartes, Amsterdam; El Ojo Ajeno Gallery in Lima. In 2012, he was awarded the Villa Kujoyama arts residency in the ‘New Images’ section. In Kyoto, Japan, the residency is run by the Institut Français. During it, he will develop his next project Ukiyo-e, Histoires du monde flottant (Ukiyo-e, Stories of the Floating World), a series of films reflecting upon the pirating of cultural contents on the Internet seen through the prism of Japanese animation. In 2013, the Lab Labanque in Béthune and the Institut Français in Mexico will both host monograph exhibitions of Maubert’s work.
Monade: Installation produced by the Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains, in partnership with the MINT research team (University Lille 1), the CNRS, LIFL UMR 8022 & IRCICA), and the INRIA Lille Nord-Europ.
