Photography Book Laurence Aëgerter: Ici mieux qu’en face (Better here than there)

Invited by the Petit Palais, artist Laurence Aëgerter will move into the permanent collections of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the fall of 2020. In situ interventions, unpublished works and existing pieces will interact with the works of the collections, following a common thread that will lead the visitor from surprises to magic. The event allows us to bring together and thus make resonate, for the first time in a monographic book, several of Laurence Aëgerter’s series.

It is by revealing the reverse side of reality in a gesture of reappropriation that plastic artist Laurence Aëgerter constructs her stories. The appropriation of this protean material (dictionaries, history books, archive images or images gleaned from the internet, works of art, museum works …) acts on her imagination and opens the way to a number of experiences: photographs, artists’ books, installations, tapestries, collaborative projects. The other, a true alter-ego, plays a major role in the development of her work.

The book is organized around three major themes that run through her work: the elasticity of time, introduced by Léa Bismuth; upside down, introduced by Taco Hidde Bakker; the repair of existences, introduced by Susana Gallego Cuesta.

Several personal exhibitions have been devoted to Laurence Aëgerter (Forum für Fotogra e in Cologne, Fries Museum in Leeuwarden, Museum Van Loon in Amsterdam, MAMAC in Nice, Rencontres d´Arles). In 2018, his book Photographic Treatment © received the Photography Book Prize at the Rencontres d´Arles.

Born in 1972 in Marseille, Laurence Aëgerter studied Art history in Aix-en-Provence and Amsterdam, then fine arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam.

Fannie Escoulen, independent curator since 2014, co-founded LE BAL in Paris and was exhibition manager at Magnum from 2004 to 2006.

Léa Bismuth is an author and art critic.

Taco Hidde Bakker is a writer and photography critic.

Susana Gállego-Cuesta was chief curator of the Petit Palais and is now director of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nancy.

More details on: https://www.actes-sud.fr/catalogue/arts/ici-mieux-quen-face