Housed in a marvellous neoclassical villa built in the 1930s on the shores of Lake Lugano, surrounded by the mountains of
Ticino, the Fondation Bally is hosting the first solo exhibition by American-Saudi artist Sarah Brahim. Born in 1992, the artist uses video and sound installations, performance photographs and sculptures to create a choreography of intimacy that redefines the concept of infinity.
What if eternity could " be conceived as a form of infinity in the finite world", as "the possibility of being stopped within ourselves, 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 curator, Spinoza in his Ethics (1677) "asserted that the spirit cannot destroy itself with the body, and that by knowing this 'we know by experience that we are eternal'"1. Some 300 years later, French philosopher Alain Badiou added the word "sometimes" to this proposition: "sometimes, we are eternal "2 and, thanks to this adverb, he was able to situate 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 too (past - present, finite - infinite), but also between the "intrabody" and the surrounding universe, that Sarah Brahim has chosen to explore in her choreographies of time. Trained as a dancer
, she "gives her works the appearance of a pas de deux, of an intimate dialogue [...] between [herself] and her otherness, where the form of the exchange retains liquid contours, where, through the choreographed gestures, the inner body and the outer body (which feels, touches and sees) unite,
her body and the body of the other, mixed and intertwined by the fluidity of the gestures".
DUO WITH TIME
Walking, breathing, rising, falling, caressing a wall... through "simple choreographies", Sarah Brahim weaves links between inside and outside, here and far away, the palpable and the impalpable, to the point of being in osmosis with architecture and nature. A descendant of the dancers of the 1960s-1970s, she sees the body as a means of expression, "dance as a heightened experience of life, a search for symbiosis between the body,
consciousness and environment".
Two photographs, one showing two hands clasped in the horizon, the other a body on a beach, testify to this quest for fusion, this quest to integrate the body into the landscape, while water, omnipresent (notably through the open architecture), appears as a metaphor for this union. Scandalized by sound scores (two stones rubbing against each other, cracking or whispering...), this quest for union (here with the earth, there with the sky, through repetitive ascents) seems to want to abolish time. Like Sisyphus tirelessly ascending and descending his mountain, the two performers in the multi-screen video installation Duet with time give their choreographed ascent, through the mechanics of repetition, 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 resting on his diaphragm, because the ebb and flow of water supports our own bodies, but also connects them to other bodies, to other worlds beyond our human selves.
STÉPHANIE DULOUT
1 Éthique, 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 (SUISSE) JUSQUAU AU 28 AVRIL 2024
BALLYFOUNDATION.CH
