Until April 13, the Fondation Cartier-Bresson presents the dark images of Karim Kal who questions the medium to the point of wondering what we can see in what we do not see.
On the ground floor of the HCB foundation, the exhibition dedicated to Karim Kal is presented. Entitled “Mons Ferratus” (the Iron Mountain linked to the very ferruginous soil of the region), it displays views taken in Kabylia. This unique space in Algeria, villages and small towns which border the Djudjura massif and which are inhabited by a specific people, the Kabyles, interested the photographer who is himself the grandson of one of them. Karim Kal found it wise to photograph the landscape at night and produce images where the entire background completely disappears. Only the reduced field of what is immediately in front of the photographer is visible, the rest being like a black curtain which absorbs all light – Karim Kal equips himself with a flash torch to achieve these particular views. Is this a reaction to the excess visibility in our contemporary world? The artist responds that it is something “more personal”, a kind of “modesty” that the Kabyle people would have and that he wanted to convey by using this “formal asceticism. » There is therefore not a cat in sight in his images, not the slightest face – except that on a poster – and not the slightest ray of sunlight from this land of Algeria. To these opaque images, the artist wanted to add symbolic still lifes: rubble recovered from Tizi-Ouzou and supposed to represent the eternal reconstruction, particularly during migration, and pieces of charred wood which recall the terrible fires that hit the region. No figures, no maps or names of villages support the photographer’s statement in a scenography that is intended to be minimalist, “museum-like” as the exhibition curator and director Clément Chéroux of the foundation explains.
Jean-Baptiste Gauvin
Karim Kal : Mons Ferratus
Until April 13, 2025
Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
79 Rue des Archives
75003 Paris
+33 1 40 61 50 50
Tuesday – Sunday 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.
www.henricartierbresson.org
