Dedicated to the field of video art and experimentation with new technologies, the Bonifacio biennial was born in 2022 at the initiative of the De Renava collective, driven by the desire " to activate the island's heritage "by establishing a dialogue between the works of international artists, the emblematic places of the city and the surrounding nature, but also the neighboring countries bathed by " the sea in the middle of the lands ».
While awaiting its second edition next summer, this new kind of biennial (particularly in its exhibition formats) is offering a high-caliber off-site program. Called De Renava Off, it is the result of an exceptional collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, which is lending works by 13 artists from the Mediterranean basin. Entitled "La Notte," in reference to Michelangelo Antonioni's cult film, the exhibition presents itself as " a stroll through the nocturnal Mediterranean […] offering a nebulous, refracted, dreamlike and incomplete vision of a certain Mediterranean imaginary As De Renava points out: Night here is indeed synonymous with freedom. […] a space where the boundaries between reality and dream become blurred, a meeting place between the sacred and the profane, a territory where bodies wander, merge, disappear, sometimes leaving only ghostly traces of their passage. »
Throughout this “journey to a dark elsewhere,” Luc Zangrie leads us in the footsteps of Persephone, goddess of the underworld. In this dreamlike short film with surrealist overtones, released in 1951, the Belgian director explores the theme of duality through the mythological figure abducted by Hades, the ruler of the Underworld, and condemned by Zeus to remain six months of the year in the realm of night before being able to cross the Styx and reappear in the light of day. With Shadows, Mohamed Bourouissa offers a reinterpretation of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a seedy version. Another nocturnal apparition is the distorted images in an explosion of shapes and colors offered by Pipilotti Rist, whose video projection Under the Stars draws the viewer into a shifting environment, alternately microscopic and macroscopic, until it provokes… a feeling of disorientation and weightlessness ". One " Technicolor paradise "Pop is counterbalanced by the dark Fumée d'Ange Leccia: a sculptural video installation surrounding the viewer and engulfing them in a cloud of smoke that gradually fills the projection space. Sensations guaranteed… Similarly, when faced with the army of ghosts sculpted from aluminum foil that make up Kader Attia's monumental installation Ghost (2007): what could be more unsettling than being confronted with absent bodies in this vertiginous staging of emptiness?"
“LA NOTTE” CENTER POMPIDOU X DE RENAVA OFF
MONTLAUR BARRACKS, BONIFACIO, CORSICA
UNTIL SEPTEMBER 29, 2023
BONIFACIO.FR/SEE-DO/CULTURE-HERITAGE/EXHIBITION-LA-NOTTE
