Pascal Berthoud

ARTISSIMA | Turin, Italie  |   6-8 novembre 2015

BODY MEMORY

Memory, a crucial aspect of our lives, is generally viewed as a mental phenomenon, a faculty of the mind whose function is to record, conserve and recall information. Without memory, it seems impossible to learn. Without memory, surely, civilizations could not exist or evolve. But what if memory also resided in the body? And if the body’s memories were even more essential than the mind’s? Still, can body memories exist without the brain? Then again, who has thought to ask how “mental” memories could exist without the body? BODY MEMORY does not set out to answer these questions. The role of art is not to provide answers, but to go deeper into the questions and, sometimes, to show them in a different light.

For Artissima, we bring together a group of artists working independently, explicitly or on an allusive way, on body memory. One iconic work for the exhibition is Ali Kazma’s video Painter. Kazma films a painter who became tetraplegic as a child, and who started painting using as brushes the wheels of his wheelchair. This painter, Jacques Coulais, also called “Pictor Maximus”, who has not been able to move since age six, paints the movement: physical movement as well as spiritual elevation, in the same gesture, moving over the canvas with his wheelchair. Other iconic works are by American video artist Janet Biggs, who has been exploring Alzheimer’s and other diseases affecting memory. Bodily memories sometimes may compensate, in the diseased individuals, for the loss of mental accuracy. Biggs defines body memory as a memory that comes into play when the usual references are lost. As she herself puts it, “When the familiar is stripped away and the known becomes unknown, there are moments of acute presence where frailty and manifest strength co-exist. These moments are body memory.”

The Australian video artist Shaun Gladwell, who is well known by Artissima for his stunning 2014 performance, explores with Tripitaka his own memories and tells us, with video and drawings, about a remote love story that becomes reminiscent, for the viewer, of her or his own.

More allusive works presented are the sculptures Circle of Life by Polish artist Joanna Malinowska (Venice Biennial Polish Pavilion 2015), that depicts our irreducible mortal, bodily, cyclic human condition; My Birthday, by Andrea Mastrovito, a four panel light box depicting the artist shooting in the sky to reproduce the constellations that where to be seen on his birth date; Embedded souls of Russia by Elena Kovylina, a video that represents the bodies of young Russians constraint, both physically and symbolically, by their country’s current policies; the already historic initial light work by Robert Montgomery entitled Sculpture for days when someone takes an eraser and erases the sky from behind the

buildings (2007), referring to renaissance paintings by Masaccio; and more: Blind, a story of invisible urban bodies

by Danni Orci; new bodily sculptures and drawings by Pascal Berthoud; Aux bords du dehors by Emmanuel Régent, that allusively refers to bodies migrating over the sea; and Man abandonned by space (1993) by Angus Fairhurst (1966-2008).

Memory plays and is played in sleep, too. It plays games with us. It collects forgotten images from our stock of images, recomposes them, mixes them with others, utterly disregarding the sequence of their recording. It animates them and brings them its own movements, colours and sounds. Dreams are videos produced by our memory: recording, composition, storage, reuse, reframing, montage, play, stop, rewind. All these processes are at work in Sleep Al Naim (The Sleeper, 2005- 2011), by mounir fatmi (Morocco). For this film fatmi took his inspiration from Sleep, in which Andy Warhol filmed the poet John Giorno sleeping for hours on end. He too filmed a poet, sleeping peacefully, his torso rising and falling to the rhythm of his breathing. Who is this poet? Salman Rushdie, a contemporary icon of freedom of expression. Did fatmi really film Rushdie? Not exactly. Having tried in vain to get in touch with the poète maudit so that he could film him in his sleep, fatmi decided to use digital technology and create the image of the sleeping writer. But what about his breathing? In fact, it is the breath of fatmi himself, who has thus “animated” Rushdie in two different ways: by creating his image, and with his own breath. “Animation” by memory is also the approach of the French artist Julien Serve, who presents photographs of him drawing his grandparents with as many traits as the number of days they lived. These photographs give an incredible sense of transmission, from the grandfather, who is re-animated by the drawing of the artist, to the artist, whose hand becomes the face of the grandfather. Julien Serve’s sumptuous and delicate golden “decollations” will also be shown

: BODY MEMORY in that case recalls Salomé on the scene.