LUXEMBOURG.- Since the early 1990s the French artist Sylvie Blocher has built up a body of video work that takes the human as its material – one that is fragile and unpredictable but charged with extreme presence. She engages with a poetics of relation, emancipation, the questioning of identities, the writing of history, the permeability of the masculine/feminine border, and codes of representation in a world under control. Created in different geographic regions, her works are based on exchange: they often involve the participation of external people, who are invited to present themselves in a completely new fashion before the camera, as the artist “shares her authority with her models” to create what she calls Living Pictures.

The creation of a participatory work and a movie
“It will be the story of an event at a museum in Luxembourg in which the visitors will not be content to look politely at the works, but decide impulsively to experience leaving the world for a few minutes, in a journey filmed and broadcast, a story of fragmented, floating bodies. Then a movie, the start of another story.” Sylvie Blocher

The solo exhibition being presented at Mudam Luxembourg revolves around an ambitious project titled Dreams Have a Language, which combines a participative work, a video installation and the production of a movie. During the first weeks of the exhibition, the museum’s Grand Hall has become a fully active film studio that centres on the operation of a flight machine twelve meters tall. Through the placement of an ad in various media, Sylvie Blocher invites the public at large to visit the museum to leave the ground for a few minutes and to “rethink the world”.

“Shooting conditions: allow one hour and present yourself at Mudam with an idea to change the world. It might be poetic, political, aesthetic, emotional, revolutionary, scientific, architectural, educational, financial, culinary, sonic, etc.”

The images of suspended bodies are screened in a video installation at the centre of the exhibition, while the encounters with the participants are the starting point of a film combining documentary and fictional writing co-directed by Blocher and Donato Rotunno, the release of which is scheduled for spring 2015.

A monographic exhibition
In the galleries on the basement floor, the exhibition includes about ten recent works that highlight various issues central to Blocher’s work: identity, otherness, the power of the imagination, the concept of “wasted time” and that of “shared responsibility” between the artist and the people she films.

By using music to give new life to important speeches and manifestos made in contemporary history (by Angela Davis, Édouard Glissant and Barack Obama, among others), the five videos that comprise the series Speeches (2009–2012, Collection Mudam Luxembourg), engage with the political dimension of the imagination, individual and collective.

Other works, like the diptych Change the Scenario (Conversation with Bruce Nauman) (2013) and the three videos recently created by Sylvie Blocher in Texas, tackle historic and racial aspects in the construction of the individual.

Placed at the entrance to each of the galleries, a series of drawings that the artist has made every day for a year, based on the front page of the newspaper Libération, places emphasis on the passages between the personal and the political initiated by her practice.

Parallel to the exhibition S'inventer autrement at Mudam, the Gallery Nosbaum Reding in Luxembourg presents from November 8, 2014 to January 31, 2015 a solo exhibition by the artist