L’Ère du Verseau
Gaëlle Choisne
2024 Prix Marcel Duchamp
Centre Pompidou | Paris, FR
Institutional
02.10.24 - 06.01.25Solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou
2024 Prix Marcel Duchamp
Paris, FR
Gaëlle Choisne is the winner of the 2024 Prix Marcel Duchamp, an annual prize awarded to young artists by the ADIAF. For the Prix Marcel Duchamp exhibition, Choisne presented L’Ère du Verseau (The Age of Aquarius) at the Centre Pompidou, which ran from 02.10.24–06.01.25.
“Choisne’s work, imbued with mysticism, searches for links between the intimate and the universal. As a woman of African descent, she is sensitive to collective history, which translates strongly in her creations, halfway between photography, sculpture and installation.
For her first solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Gaëlle Choisne proposes a temporal and sensorial journey in a recomposed space. On the floor: dyed, black concretions made of cork, like a volcanic beach; on the walls: large painted panels adorned with a collection of various found items; in the centre: hive-like structures, also made of cork, from which video sequences are projected. With this hybrid installation, which is “an island, an archipelago, a place where different realities accumulate to be reinvented and repaired”, the artist invites us to “change our perspective on the world and become an observer of our own species”.
Having studied at the Fine Arts Academy in Amsterdam and the Fine Arts School in Lyon, Gaëlle Choisne combines a sometimes very documentary practice that is close to her subjects, with a much more speculative approach aiming to open her discourse to different habitable and possible worlds. This oscillation between criticism and the power of the imaginary gives her the scope to reveal the full depth of the social and environmental dynamics that concern her. Her large paintings on wooden panels, which she calls “scrap paintings” (in reference to scrapbooking, an activity that is a bit “trivial and poorly considered”, in her words), are replete with mysterious inscriptions, which she describes as “a form of galactic, talismanic writing.
Profoundly influenced by the work of British author and critic Ekow Eshun and Pan-Africanist Nioussérê Kalala Omotunde, Gaëlle Choisne is also driven by a desire for reparation and healing: “I connect with an energy, I channel messages from other worlds to create new temporal lines of healing and make our planet healthier”. The artist also tries to “create a sort of transgenerational and fictional family”. She glues, assembles and superposes photos of black families that she often finds at flea markets or even created from scratch by AI. To these, she adds “rubbish” found in the street, such as dropped bits of paper or commercial stickers, but also locks of hair. “I often use fake hair, like the kind used in afro extensions. I like this trivial aspect, something that isn’t considered noble. And then, with hair, there’s the notion of roots…”.
Breton through her mother and Haitian through her father, Gaëlle Choisne is marked by these two cultures that are “complete opposites in the way they perceive the world – one through intuition and the invisible, and the other through mathematical and physical rationalisation”, she explains. “Instead of fighting them, I embraced these contradictions. It took me a long time to understand that there was no need to choose”. As the storm finally breaks outside and torrential rain beats down on the city, she adds: “I play with colonial and decolonial history, I represent black bodies, the bodies of trans or non-binary people. As a black woman, I don’t believe I always have a space where I can feel secure, so I create my own spaces, my ‘safe spaces’”. Recount and repair, always.”
Text by Séverine Pierron