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Paola Yacoub et Michel Lasserre, Sud Liban,
avril 2001
The artists Paola Yacoub (Beirut, 1966) and Michel Lasserre (France, 1947) have worked together since 1996. Through their current installation and accompanying commentary, the couple offers us an analysis and critical interpretation of a certain space in Lebanon (specifically Beirut and Southern Lebanon) during and after 15 years of war.
The two have chosen as their starting point territorial fragments (a route, village, hotel…), which they situate and document using photos, videos, sound recordings, maps and texts. Through dynamic montage, they study how these elements have changed in people’s perception and use in accordance with the political and social context.
As Catherine David1 has pointed out, the two artists “contrast the current state of various sites and landscapes, where nothing seems to speak of tragedy, with the memories and eyewitness recollections of combatants and victims of the war.”
The two artists have focused on the conditions that govern the content of a document, that is, on underlying factors such as the time, place, emotional aspects and associations. Our perception of a hotel lobby is noticeably modified, for example, when we learn that during the war such areas, the Holiday Inn’s lobby in particular, often functioned as places where negotiations to free hostages were conducted. The images of such sites become vectors for associations and emotions that render history “palpable” and imbue the territory with “eloquence.”
Paola Yacoub et Michel Lasserre, Les Routes, 2004
As Anna Tilroe2 has put it, “This has nothing to do with esthetics (of an image); rather, what is at stake is the capacity of an image to evoke other images and thus bring about a dynamic process of associations.”
According to Yacoub and Lasserre, the project which will be shown at the Centre for Contemporary Images, Aspects/Accents/Frontières, focuses on the “expressiveness of territories, the visual changes of places figuring in recent historical events.” Three slide shows made up of selections from a series of field photographs shot in Southern Lebanon occupy the exhibition space and focus on borders, routes and landscape relief. Explanations of the events that took place at the featured sites, together with both the juxtaposition and association of these images, cast a new light on the show’s photographs. During the run of the same exhibition at Le Plateau in Paris (2002), visitors were able to compare in particular a photograph of Paris’s Roissy airport with a shot of the border in Southern Lebanon displaying similarities that proved both surprising and altogether disconcerting.
Paola Yacoub and Michel Lasserre will give a talk on their exhibition entitled:
Les archives, quelle histoire ! (The Archives, what a story!), on Friday, 30 April at 6 P.M. at the
Centre for Contemporary Images. Their positions, approach and method of working will be the subject of the evening’s discussion.
1Catherine David, Paola Yacoub Michel Lasserre, Aspects/ Accents/Frontières, Maquis, Le Plateau
2Anna Tilroe, Laboratory Beirut, NRC-Handelsblad, 16 november 2003
Paola Yacoub et Michel Lasserre, Les Routes, 2004 |
Paola Yacoub et Michel Lasserre, Les Routes, 2004 |
Paola Yacoub Michel Lasserre
Paola Yacoub born in 1966 in Beiruth, Lebanon
Michel Lasserre born in 1947 in Auch, France
Live and work in Berlin.
Forthcoming Exhibitions
2004
Shifting Moments: Aspects of Urbanistic Aura, Fluctuating Images, Contemporary Media Art, Stuttgart, Germany, O.V. Original Version
Original Version, Cinémas de demain, Plasticiens du web, Centre Pompidou, Paris
Original Version, Busan Biennial, Busan, Korea
Solo Exhibitions (selection)
2003
Reparto, Galeria Visor, Valencia, Spain, in the framework of Nuevas formas de documentar, Improbable presentation
2002
Nouvelles Archives, Galerie Claude Samuel, Paris, in the framework of Le Mois de la Photo à Paris
Sohmor Yohmor, Galerie K&S, Berlin
Le prochain village, Galerie Claude Samuel, Paris
The next village, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Exposed villages presentation
2000
Less aesthetics more ethics, Venice Biennial, Garden of Eden and Cities in pain, Pain have spaces to move in Web workshop
Paola Yacoub Michel Lasserre
Now, the great wall of China in South Lebanon,2000
©Rainer Jordan
Group exhibitions (selection)
2004
Les Collections, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, France, Aspects/Accents/Frontières
Making Differences, Contemporary Arab Representations, The Swedish Museum of National Antiquities, Stockholm, Sweden
2003
Dubrovnik - Ici et ailleurs, Umjetnicka Galerija Dubrovnik, Croatia, Format
Dreams and Conflicts, The dictatorship of the viewer, 50th International art exhibition, Venice Biennial, O.V. number 1 / O.V. number 2
2002
Lucky Seoul, The Japan Foundation Japan Cultural Center and Insa Art Space, Seoul, Korea, Supplements
Maquis, Le Plateau, Paris, Aspects/Accents/Frontières, Proximités presentation, Plateaux de travail intervention on neighborhood relationships between the art center and its local residents
Contemporary Arab Representations, Witte de White Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, Aspects, That begins again presentation
Contemporary Arab Representations, Fundacio Antoni Tapies, Barcelona, Aspects, Movement presentation
Iconografias Metropolitanas, 25th Sao Paulo Biennial, Denieh, village du Nord Liban, Valor newspaper
2001
Faces of truth, Ayloul Festival, Beirut, Al Manazer (Aspects), La routine presentation
2000
Stand der Ding (Teil 1), Kunst-Werke, Berlin, Now the Great Wall of China in South Lebanon, Play on-synoptic tables of the actual Lebanese war presentation
Catalogues and publications
Paola Yacoub Michel Lasserre, Beirut is a magnificent city. Synoptic pictures, (English/Spanich/French/German), Fundacio Antoni Tapies, Barcelona, 2003
Dreams and conflicts, The dictatorship of the viewer, 50th International art exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Marsilio, 2003
Inside density, International Colloquium on Architecture and cities #1, La lettre volée, Brussels, 2003
The remembrance of a city, The history of a space, an international symposium on alternative space, The Korean culture & arts foundation, INSA Art Space, Seoul, Korea, 2002
Mois de la Photo à Paris, Paris Audiovisuel, 2002
Maquis, Le Plateau, Fonds régional d’art contemporain d’Ile de France, La lettre volée, Brussels, 2002
Jahrbuch 6, Akademie Schloss Solitude editions, 2002
Moulène Sala, Sao Paulo, 2002, Images en manoeuvres editions/Carta Blanca editions, 2002
Tamass, Contemporary Arab Representations, Beirut/Lebanon 1, Fundacio Antoni Tapiès, Barcelona, 2002
Rethinking: space.time.architecture, XXI UIA World Congress of Architecture, Jovis, Berlin, 2002
Pré/occupations d'espace, Jérusalem au pluriel, Images en manoeuvre editions/Carta Blanca editions, 2001
KW Magazine 02/01, special issue Media realities, Kunst-Werke, Berlin, 2000/2001
Stand der Ding (Teil 1) Kunst-Werke, Berlin, 2000
Less aesthetics, more ethics, La Biennale di Venezia, 7th International Architecture Exhibition, Marsilio, 06/2000
La Biennale di Venezia, on line, Less aesthetics, more ethics, Marsilio, 06/2000
On line
www.centrodearte.com Algunas preguntas a Paola Yacoub Michel Lasserre
Paola Yacoub et Michel Lasserre, Sud Liban, septembre 2000
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