Does reality not exist outside of its narratives? At a time when our living space is invaded by videos and series, real events and stories, fake news and scrolling, has storytelling become the beating heart of our lives and of global television news, while the metaverse prepares us to soon become avatars?
This is the premise of the exhibition entitled, rather audaciously, "True Stories," on display at the MAC VAL (Museum of Contemporary Art of Val-de-Marne). Presenting fictions in a wide variety of forms (from video and drawing to performance and tapestry), the 40 or so artists involved explore "this floating space between art and life," between truth and fiction, to bring forth new "realities" that viewers may or may not choose to accept.
Many artists, playing with these porous boundaries between art and autobiography, reality and fiction, offer us intimate, even immodest, narratives which, if the narrative strategies employed succeed in "fictionalizing" reality, in inoculating reality with the magic of fiction, trigger the process of identification that will transform the spectator-voyeur into a thinker… For, as Frank Lamy, curator of the exhibition, explains, fiction allows us to "interrogate the facts," to question, to "deconstruct, to reveal," and, quoting one of its contributors, " Each viewer is invited to compose their own narrative, somewhere between nightmare and dream. » faced with these “micro-narratives” with multiple levels of interpretation.
On the dystopian side, the duo Aletheia questions the power of words wielded by the GAFAM companies, the digital monopolies asserting their "truth" on the internet. In the realm of the absurd, Esther Ferrer, who transformed life stories into cacophony during a performance activated for the European Night of Museums in 2014, prefers to annihilate language altogether. Also absurd are the collages of images forming nested narratives by Hippolyte Hentgen, another artist duo.
By having social groups reenact lived situations, Alice Brygo shifts the documentary film towards a dreamlike tale, as does Anaïs-Tohé Commaret, who skillfully blurs the lines between recounted stories, memories, and lived reality. At the crossroads of myth and exploration narrative, Aurélien Mauplot also delights in intertwining reality and fiction in his trompe-l'oeil compositions, making us question the very nature of representation. Featuring heterogeneous, fragmented, and disproportionate bodies, Laura Bottereau and Marine Fiquet, for their part, make us question our corporeality and the integrity of our identity, as do the creatures and other hybridizations of Kenny Dunkan, who seek to " to generate [one's] own image and not the one assigned to [oneself] "...
“The work is not a testimony to an external reality, but it is itself its own reality,” wrote Alain Robbe-Grillet in 1963 in his essay For a New Novel, adding that … the function of art is never to illustrate a truth […] but to give rise to questions… ».
“TRUE STORIES” – MAC VAL
Place de la Libération, Vitry-sur-Seine
UNTIL SEPTEMBER 17
MACVAL.FR
