In her videos, Élise Leclercq invites persons she meets to transpose their daily gestures and live them in relation with a place by suggesting them to create a visual and symbolic story of themselves in situ. Here, no stage direction where we get lost into attributed roles, each one plays his own character and questions it through ritualised gesture written in the space, which makes possible what the artist calls a micro-fiction.
Extract of the text written by Maya Mikelsone, curator of the exhibition
Meetings around the exhibition :
Morad Montazami is a PhD student in art history at EHESS (École des hautes études en sciences sociales, School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences), where he conducts research on “Practical fieldwork and procedures of inquiry in contemporary art.” His research is comprised of three axes: those of “arts of the field” and the inquiry procedures put in place by the artists who observe a community, or sometimes, its remnants; the reproduction of these inquiries under divers forms of collections or archives that are invested in the exposition’s space by playing with the history of museology; finally, the role of the image itself and of the representation, in the prism of the relationships of otherness and cultural translatability. During his presentation, his observations about the work of Élise Leclercq, with whom he already collaborated in the context of other exhibitions, were largely concerned with the first and last axes outlined above.
Maya Mikelsone is an independent curator who recently graduated from l’École du Magasin, a school of curatorial practices. Her research themes center on dissenting art in totalitarian regimes, the issue of liberty in creation, and the concept of reality. She has worked in many galleries of contemporary art as well as at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. She assisted Élise Leclercq in the setting-up of her exhibitions at the Galerie du Haut-Pavé. During her presentation, she spoke about the ongoing exposition and Élise Leclercq’s artistic approach.
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