Located in a wonderful neoclassical villa built in the 1930s on the shores of Lake Lugano, surrounded by the mountains of
Ticino, the Bally Foundation hosts the first solo exhibition of the American-Saudi artist Sarah Brahim. Born in 1992, the artist uses video and sound installations, as well as photographs of performances and sculptures, to create a choreography of intimacy that redefines the concept of infinity.
And if eternity could " conceiving of oneself as a form of infinity in the finite world,” as “the possibility of being arrested within oneself, in
the inner experience of our own infinity "?" asks Vittoria Matarrese, director of the Bally Foundation and curator of the exhibition entitled "Sometimes we are eternal" in reference to two philosophical thoughts.
Thus, explains the commissioner, Spinoza in his Ethics (1677) “asserted that the mind cannot destroy itself with the body and that, knowing this, ‘we know from experience that we are eternal’ 1. The French philosopher Alain Badiou, some 300 years later, adds the word ‘sometimes’ to this proposition: ‘sometimes, we are eternal’ 2 and thanks to this adverb, he situates eternity in time. This ‘sometimes’ seems to indicate a sensation, a moment, and proposes a new relationship between the finite and the infinite, between universal truths and particular bodies.”
FUSION
It is these interstices between universal sensations and particular bodies, between temporalities (past-present, finite-infinite), but also between the "intracorporeal" and the surrounding universe, that Sarah Brahim has chosen to explore in her choreographies of time. Dancer
In terms of training, she "gives her works the appearance of a pas de deux, an intimate dialogue [...] between [her] and her otherness, where the form of the exchange retains fluid contours, where the inner body and the outer body (which feels, touches and sees) are united through choreographed gestures.
"Her body and the other's body, mingled and intertwined by the fluidity of their movements."
DUET WITH TIME
Walking, breathing, rising, falling, caressing a wall… through “simple choreographies,” Sarah Brahim weaves connections between inside and outside, here and far, the tangible and the intangible, until she is in osmosis with architecture and nature. An heir to the dancers of the 1960s and 1970s, she envisions the body as a means of expression, “dance as an enhanced experience of life, a search for symbiosis of the body.”
of consciousness and the environment."
Thus, two photographs—one showing two hands clasped against the horizon, the other a body on a beach—bear witness to this search for fusion, this quest for the integration of the body into the landscape, while the omnipresent water (particularly through the open architecture) appears as a metaphor for this union. Punctuated by soundscapes (two stones rubbed together, creaking or whispering…), this quest for union (here, with the earth, there, with the sky, through repetitive ascents) seems to seek to abolish time. Like Sisyphus tirelessly climbing and descending his mountain, the two performers in the multi-screen video installation Duet with Time imbue their ascending choreography, through the mechanics of repetition, with the aspect of a ritual.
Just like the two levitating bodies in the video installation I like never, I also like ever, or the extremely slow walk along the ocean's edge in his Adagio filmed to the rhythm of his breathing, the camera placed on his diaphragm, because the ebb and flow of the waters supports our own bodies, but also connects them to other bodies, to other worlds beyond our human self.
STÉPHANIE DULOUT
1 Ethics, Spinoza, proposition 23
2 Sometimes we are eternal, Alain Badiou, Nick Nesbitt, Kenneth Reinhard, Jana Ndiaye Berankova. Edited by Jana Ndiaye Berankova and Norma Hussey, Suture Press
3 Bodies of Water, Astrida Neimanis, Bloomsbury Publishing
“SARAH BRAHIM – SOMETIMES WE ARE ETERNAL” BALLY FOUNDATION, VILLA HELENEUM
VIA CORTIVO 24, LUGANO (SWITZERLAND) UNTIL APRIL 28, 2024
BALLYFOUNDATION.CH
