From 9th February to 13th May, Le Bal, in Paris, presents In Between, a collective exhibition that focuses on the state of a world characterised by a loss of bearings and direction. Something of our fragile times in which individuals wander, their lives suspended. Fourteen contemporary photographers – of whom Bas Jan Ader, Debi Cornwall, Luc Delahaye, Darek Fortas, Hiwa K, Rabih Mroué, and Henk Wildschut – capture our times in different artistic forms. The Eye of Photography is devoting a special edition to the show.
The German philosopher Hannah Arendt said, “What is lost is the specific and usually irreplaceable in-between which should have formed between this individual and his fellow men”. This exhibition is a poetic, abstract, fragile attempt to translate something of our times. Something indefinable, intangible but that might be recognised as the condition of one person, of several or of all: being in an in-between state.
Neither a transition towards a possible future, nor an intermediate stage, this condition relates to an inability to move forward or a repetition of the same cycle ad infinitum. No longer knowing where to go, feeling out of place, having an indeterminate, blurry, precarious status and repeating gestures that have no meaning or purpose are its outward manifestations.
Often likened to paralysis or being stunned, this in-between state is the opposite, constantly changing, a threat comes into focus, time seems to be running out. It is not a struggle to break free from temporality but a fight to be a part of.
Elusive and protean, the state of oblivion is also something that defies depiction. How can its substance and reality be expressed? How can a person living in this state be represented, disappearing under the immediate proliferation and obsolescence of images, discourses, laws and technologies, indifferent to his fate?
For the artists, the in-between state is not a “subject”. It takes place there, somewhere, almost in spite of them. Their images are striking for their brutal, concrete and immediate intensity, but also touching in their simplicity, a kind of neutrality, laconic, as though they had to thinned out the language in order to get as close to the meaning as possible.
Shown here are the people relegated out of history, out of the landscape, in a situation of survival in a political no-man’s-land: empty spaces, bodies frozen in time, isolated or caught, without a mooring. Space closes in on itself. The faces have disappeared, so has the complicity of a glance.
A heterogeneous constellation of places and problems, the exhibition weaves a wide network of connections, suggesting a common place of oblivion. When the myth of history moving forward in a straight line ends, when the idea of a shared destiny is lacking, the in-between spreads out on another scale. It has reached the stage of describing a state of the world.
Diane Dufour
Diane Dufour is director of LE BAL in Paris.
En suspens
From 9th February to 13th May 2018
Le Bal
6 Impasse de la Défense
75018 Paris
France
