As part of the Mulhouse Photography Biennale, curator Sonia Voss has envisioned a poetic dialogue between two artists, each exploring ecological issues in their own way: Lithuanian Andrej Polukord and French artist Léa Habourdin meet within the Chapelle Saint-Jean.
Although the exhibition Monuments and Immortelles is held in a historic building in the center of Mulhouse, it is under the sign of Nida. This Lithuanian seaside town hosts an annual photography symposium where artists, historians, authors, curators, and commissioners come together for exhibitions and conferences. It was in Nida that Léa Habourdin conceived the work presented here, and it was there that Sonia Voss, invited to present her research on East German photography, discovered Andrej Polukord’s work.
To denounce deforestation caused by furniture brands in the forests of Eastern and Northern Europe, the Lithuanian photographer climbed to the tops of felled trees, sometimes at impressive heights. From this, he created the series Wood Statues, portraits at “the intersection of photography, performance, and ready-made” in which he is seen standing, stiff as a statue, atop these sacrificed trunks. While he appears as an extension of the tree, these self-portraits, hovering between heroism and absurdity, are mainly a way to humorously criticize how humans destroy nature for their own comfort.
These photographs resonate with the hieratic poses of the stone statues on the funerary steles of the Chapelle Saint-Jean, creating a humorous echo of humanity’s solemn self-perception throughout history. They face a large fabric checkerboard by Léa Habourdin, whose squares poetically respond to the composition of the chapel’s frescoes.
The French photographer has a special connection to Lithuania, which she has visited several times. Invited for a residency in Nida in the spring of 2024, she drew inspiration from the research of 18th-century canon-botanists, the Desbiey brothers, who worked on stabilizing dunes with vegetation. Planting vegetation helped slow the movement of dunes caused by the wind or the sea.
Léa Habourdin recreated the landscape of the Curonian Spit dunes by assembling several photographs that she printed on Lithuanian linen using dyes made from the natural pigments of local plants: immortelle flowers, madder flowers, artichokes, and cosmos. Having previously worked on the impermanence of prints whose natural pigments gradually faded, here she explores the opposite process: in her own words, “the image is almost absorbed by the linen, it becomes part of the material.” This highly precise work, the result of meticulous research, is transposed into a spectacular and poetic installation.
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