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2/11/2007

Philippe Bazin

Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris

Dark silence

For his new solo exhibition at anne barrault gallery, Philippe Bazin presents a set of photographs and videos.

In 2003, the Dunkirk Museum of Fine Arts asked me to respond to a piece of work of its collection of ancient paintings, the portrait of a young black slave by Hyacinthe Rigaud. A magnificent painting and a terrible subject : this teenager wears a big metal necklace tied to a chain. I decided to meet natives of the Comoros, many of them living in the town, although they are ignored in the streets, the shops, and are confined in council housing estates in the suburbs. A fascinating contact with people bursting with energy.

For two hours, they told me their lives and their relationship with the surrounding world. Born in large islands in the Indian Ocean, they are sailors who have often worked for the National Navy, the merchant navy, and in main French harbours. Their tales are also made of an everyday experience exposed to usual hostile discrimination.They are slices of life which I have chosen to relate in thirty short video interviews. Each of them has stood in front of a white screen and told what happened to him. These stories constantly remind you of their condition, that of "invisible Men" (Ralph Ellison). Sometimes it is more a question of grasping day-to-day life with the unability of speaking the facts.

Travel is the core of this exhibition, travel in the conscienciousness of what one is, travel through the words others are allowed to speak, travel through time thanks to the photographs of ethnic casts, made in the nineteenth century, which take us back to our past, travel through the seas on a container ship which has become today's iillustration of secret and unspeakable transport.
So travel through the dark and silence.
Philippe Bazin, July 2007

Galerie Anne Barrault
22 rue Saint-Claude - Paris
Free admission

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