The work assembled under the title Border Lines was made during trips to Israel and the Palestinian Territories. The implementation of these images makes a fundamental appeal to digital technology; based on a montage in panorama format, the images maintain a descriptive and utopic connection to reality.
The scenes were all observed from a precise topography but according to different temporalities. Therefore, in the same space, the discrepancies of time are re-sychronized by the images and the seams are left exposed: the Holy Land becomes a place of possible encounters while remaining present in its topographic reality.
Reworked by succcessive copying, the shots function as a sketchbook and as visual notation. Digital treatment is not used for effects but to amend the real, a powerful use of digital photography which conditions the contact with the world. The world which Cordesse shows us, these places so symbolic and generally caught up in media stereotypes, is a grand scene where the daily joins the historical issues of societies which co-exist.
In this way, the artist puts into place a practice which,starting from the problematics of image treatment, situates itself half-way between the reflection of a photographs’ responsibility and its potential for the imaginary. To show, if needed, that digital art has transformed itself from candid expressive exploration to become a veritable instrument of creative innovation.
Michel Poivert
Alexis Cordesse began his photographer’s career in 1991, as a reporter, at the age of 20. His pictures were published in the French and foreign press. After these first years of initiation, he went away from the practice of photojournalism. He started using new medias and supports, as cinema or installation. He created a new distance and a new duration, without establishing the one or the other one in aesthetic standard. Experimenting different genres as portrait or street photography, its artistic research feeds on a critical reflection on the responsibility of the images and the ethics of the testimony in our contemporary world.
His work has been shown at the Dokumenta XI (Kassel, 2002), at the ICP (New York, 2003), during the Month of Photography (Paris, 2010). He was awarded Lucien & Rodolf Herve Prize in 2010 and Arcimboldo Prize in 2011.
Alexis Cordesse – Border lines
Du 18 novembre au 5 décembre 2012
Exposition produite et diffusée par l’Institut Français.
Centre Khalil Sakakini
PO Box 1887, near the Luthren Street
Ramallah, Palestine
