“Thoughts are clouds.[…]Even the silence is a sentence, therefore a way to move on”
Jean-François Lyotard
BISCHOFF/WEISS is pleased to present the work of video artists Noëlle Pujol and Olivier Zabat. Over the last few years both artists have developed a specific approach to the documentary form and for this exhibition, Zabat’s Ne me touche pas, 2008 and Pujol’s Timadeuc, 2007 will be presented as two individual channel projections. The works examine the intertwined connections between body, movement, time and space within the filmic context and address the recording of reality alongside the construction of the poetic.
The exhibition presents two distinct though comparable ways of filming a given reality – as well as the precision of each artists’ own elaborated cinematic language. Utilising different aspects of a staged cinematography by a mise-en-scène which manifests itself through the enactment of the protagonists in Zabat’s Ne me touche pas or by the editing in successive tableaux in Pujol’s Timadeuc, the boundaries between documentary and fiction remain resolutely blurred.
In Ne me touche pas, Zabat focuses on two young men in a car park in the Parisian suburbs. The actors subvert reality and enter into the mutual exploration of a staged fight in an indoor closed environment -referring to the ‘huis-clos’. In this short film the tension is heightened as one of the protagonists takes on the role of instructing the other while camera movements are kept to a minimum. The background sound predominates, intermittently disturbing, interrupting the voice of the actors, canceling them both.
Pujol’s Timadeuc was filmed in an abbey in French Brittany during the Holy Week, when Cistercian monks held a ceremony open to the public. The scene takes place in an open environment, where the subjects evolve and move in total freedom from one space to the next. The plan fixe is the choice of the artist as to correspond to this Cistercian architecture, which is austere and includes minimal settings. The film is composed of nine plan-sequences, nine tableaux referring to a musical partition, in which the contemplation of the community of monks finds its ‘form’ in silence, here considered as a sound situation in its own right.
Noëlle Pujol (b. 1972) is a French artist and film director based in Paris and Budapest. Her practice spans documentary films, video installations and photography. Selected exhibitions and screenings include La Vie à l’épreuve, IAC, Villeurbanne; en vue… des manières de voir, Centre d’art La Passerelle, Brest; Short Film Corner, Festival de Cannes; Cinema du Réel, Centre Pompidou; Paris-Berlin-Madrid, Musée National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Festival International du Documentaire de Marseille; Pas d’histoires, South London Gallery; Ficcions documentals, Fundacio la Caixa, Barcelone; Locarno International film festival; From a global world: Martin Parr and Noëlle Pujol, Galerie Ludovic de Wavrin, Paris; Touching from a distance, Crawford Gallery, Cork; ZAC99, Infozone, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris.
Olivier Zabat (b. 1965) is a French artist and director based in Paris. Selected exhibitions and screenings include Adversaires, Etablissements d’en Face, Brussels; Manifesta 5 – San Sebastian; Mémoires, Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris; Festival International du Documentaire de Marseille; The need to document, Kunstlerhaus, Basel; Kunstverein München, Munich; Alternative History of the modern conflict, Imperial War Museum, London; International Film Festival Rotterdam (Netherlands); Fenêtre sur le Court contemporain, La Cinémathèque Française, Paris; Traversées, Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris, Paris; What – a tale in free images, Memlingmuseum of Brugges (Belgium); Histoire de l’infamie, Arsenal Pavillion, Venice Biennial.
Anne-Sophie Dinant is Associate Curator at the South London Gallery and a free-lance curator. She is based in London.
