Exhibition view, "Le monde est un abri", Valérie Jouve

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Saturday 23 March 2024 à 15h

Artist talk — Le monde est un abri, Valérie Jouve

With Dork Zabunyan

Artist talk on March 23rd at 3pm

In the presence of the artist and Dork Zabunyan, professor at Université Paris 8.

Free shuttle from Paris, Place de la Bastille, at 2:15pm. Reservation required.

Le monde est un abri, an exhibtion from February 11th to April 14th

 

A few years after her major retrospective at the Jeu de Paume, Valérie Jouve has a new exhibition at the Centre Photographique d’Île-de-France. Comprising around 60 works and a previously unseen film, it brings together images that are emblematic of her work and new photos arranged into carefully designed ensembles that testify to her continued interest in the relationship between people and their environment.

 

The notion of shelter lies at the heart of the exhibition, encouraging visitors to consider the close ties that connect human beings and structures, whether natural or man-made. This relationship takes on a tangible form in the act of seeking refuge, something that Jouve considers to be determined today more by the financial economy than by a desire to protect living things. Her idea here is to get back in touch with the protective function of architecture, a direction that takes us back to the origin of the very first settlements, which resulted from the desire of human beings to organise their surroundings. This desire to organise went hand in hand with a fear of the adverse aspects of nature, even if the solution meant wiping out every trace of plant life from our living space. Having said that, a noteworthy feature in the work of Valérie Jouve is that nature is never far away. In the interstices, in those in-between spaces, such as wastelands, building sites and ruins, buildings return to their primordial mineral nature, revealing a materiality that favours the appearance of organic life, as illustrated by Jouve’s images of moss and lichen. Her observations of the town take place as it undergoes an enduring process of reconfiguration and renewal, a fluid time frame that resonates with the way in which the photos are presented.
 
 

Valérie Jouve (born Saint-Etienne, 1964) is a photographer and filmmaker who lives and works in Paris, where she teaches at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts. She studied ethnology at the Université de Lyon and photography at the ENSP in Arles, “My work has always used a dialogue with individuals and quirky locations to challenge dominant frameworks”, she says. A tireless observer of her time, she is on a quest to find perception and a fair perspective.

Valérie Jouve is represented by Galerie Xippas (Paris, Geneva, Punta del Este).

https://www.xippas.com/artists/valerie-jouve/

 

 

Dork Zabunyan is a Professor in Cinematographic Studies at Université Paris 8. He published, among other publications, L'insistances des luttes - Images, soulèvements, contre-révolutions (de l'incidence éditeur, 2016), Foucault at the Movies (avec Patrice Maniglier, Columbia University Press, 2018), Fictions de Trump - Puissances des images et exerices du pouvoir (Point du Jour, 2020) and Jacques Rancière et le monde des images (Mimésis, 2023).

 

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Visuel : Aurélien Mole, view of the exhibition Le monde est un abri  by Valérie Jouve. Artworks : Sans titre (Les Façades), 2020-2023 / Sans titre (Les Personnages avec Abu Hassan), 2009, © Adagp, Paris, 2024

 

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