Klavdij Sluban, Leica on the shoulder, white and black film, “tells” the “East” to who knows that there is still one or more. Namely areas of hate. Hence his photographs taken during trans-Siberian journeys to China, Mongolia, Russia.
The artist moved in this “Far East” in search of living beings, fleeing animals or humans stuck in an oppressive immensity and an infinite silence always perceptible in a work done to scramble the cards. Everything seems to come out of the shadows. The snow itself is almost black.
Refusing a fast exposure speed Klavdij Sluban leaves a long pause on the closed diaphragm so that the silence itself will nimble and opiate the grip. The immobile becomes what Erri De Luca calls “the state of grace of the Messianic moment” where everything seems to close and finish.
In Yverdon, the “free” exhibition (curators Barbara Polla and Karine Tissot) presents 48 photographs from the “Entre Parenthèses” series. Klavdij Sluban’s “look on the prisoners” becomes the eyes of the detainees.
The photographer compels the viewer’s gaze to dive into that of the detainees, as in this iconic portrait (Nievil, Russia, 1998): a young man looks at us, a man still young, an ageless man or rather who condenses all ages of life. He is not face to face, he half-turns to show us, to give us to see his vision of life, to give us the images that are his, deep in his eyes, in his brain, to exchange his vision with ours, his vision of the world with ours. West and East.
Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret
Until February 9, 2020
Centre d’Art Contemporain
Yverdon-Les-Bains
Place Pestalozzi, CP 649
