31.10.2019 Lecture
Gaëlle Choisne
Gaëlle Choisne transforms knowledge into shapes, forms, and matter, investigating the contradictions inherent in materials. The physicality of her eclectic installations is expressed in metaphorical layers and complex dialectics that reveal both tension and opacity – the outcome is an intentional, positive chaos constantly balancing formality with sensitive gestures and spiritual connections. Choisne employs an anti-categorization that transcends distinctions and hierarchies through poetic relations. Even though she has stopped making photographs, images loaded with contextual meaning still circulate within her installations; carried by or attached to other materials, these pictures refer to distant places, making them present. The aesthetic forms and materials used resonate on both theoretical and linguistic levels, as names (and their sounds) have various ambiguous associations.
In her films she aims to decolonize the relationships and perceptions typically constructed by ethnographic documentaries that reflect the colonial project: presenting the position of an omniscient observer with a neutral perspective that imposes the white gaze on modes of blackness. Choisne rather seeks unlearn this history of moving images by constructing films based on actual interactions, exchanges, and participative representation. In her current installation she re-utilizes parts of her own video work to create a new constellation that interacts with the musical scores of Carmen Brouard, a nineteenth-century female Haitian pianist and composer who created a syncretic idiom. Choisne thus avoids direct meanings and opts for an acceptance and appreciation of the creolizing chaos present in her spaces of flux.