The city of Northern France hosts an exhibition dedicated to the theme of vertigo. Orchestrated by independent curator Léa Bismuth, it shows an elegant vision of Georges Bataille’s thought in a free and light stroll.
Last part of a series of exhibitions devoted to the “crossing of anxieties”, Vertiges opens on the photographs of Juliette Agnel, in the space entitled “the plateau” within Labanque, former building of the Bank of France in Bethune. The photographer offers an immersion in front of giant glaciers that she photographed in Greenland. The greatness of the prints reveals the splendor of those immense pieces of ice which are so often spoken of today and which are more than ever threatened. Performed digitally, these photographs are then reworked in the studio to achieve this particular hue, almost orange on some or dark blue on others. A strange mixture of light, of photographic inversion and which gives us a certain way of seeing the glaciers, to imagine them closer to us, more accomplices, more intimate.
Hiroshima
Not far from there is the extensive work by photographer Antoine d’Agata. The artist has collected nearly a thousand photographs in a bold display that gives pride of place to the major theme of his work, violence. On the left, images taken in Mexico where people shoot heroin while others indulge in strange and cruel orgies. Further on, d’ Agata is photographed miserable people in India sleeping on the streets wrapped in their blankets. Further on, these are Hiroshima’s archive footage of the suffering of the children, the horror caused by the atomic bomb. D’Agata exposes us to the violence of the world and at the same time, his images are also the reflection of a tender personality, worried and concerned about the future of humanity.
Ropes
In the basement, are exposed videos of Romina Novellis. The artist is keen to introduce people on the margins of society into amazing staging, such as this dance in a circle in an old prison where people from all walks of life – including a disabled person with his walker – follow each other. other. The other video shows a group of very heterogeneous individuals with the nude artist in the middle who are investing an abandoned amusement park; metaphor of a utopia where living together would have become so simple …
A floor above, we will stop on the video of Rebecca Digne. The artist has tied an immense rope to large rocks on the coast of a corner of Italy where she comes from. Pulling on the rope, she shakes her line of life, her presence on earth, the thread on which the artist must hold; as a tightrope walker who is not afraid to fall, as a face up to emptiness.
Jean-Baptiste Gauvin
Vertiges
Until February 10th
44 place Georges Clémenceau
62400 Béthune
