24/1/2002
Bardin & Ohanian
Frac, Montpellier
For this year's first exhibition, the Frac is showing the work of two artists, both members of the new generation: Olivier Bardin and Mélik Ohanian. Their respective approaches are concerned with the place of the onlooker and the status of the image. However, these issues do not involve relational aesthetics but rather the consequences of communicational variants, media, and so on, on our perceptions of space and time. They come up with spaces for living in, either alone or with others.
Olivier Bardin / Je crois Melik Ohanian / Freezing film
For this year's first exhibition, the Frac is showing the work of
two artists, both members of the new generation: Olivier
Bardin and Mélik Ohanian. Their respective approaches are
concerned with the place of the onlooker and the status of
the image. However, these issues do not involve relational
aesthetics but rather the consequences of communicational
variants, media, and so on, on our perceptions of space and
time.
They come up with spaces for living in, either alone or
with others. In this context, accommodating onlookers
renders the matter of symbolic and concrete appropriation,
be it of places, art forms or human relations, possible and
renewable.
Olivier Bardin deals with space and forces
onlookers to stoop in order to make their way into a minimal
room. Dazzled to begin with by the light of the video
projector, visitors tend to turn round and face newcomers and
a screen. The film being shown is an interview on a TV studio
set of Bruno Racine (1) by a child of about ten, about
matters of strategy and the current international situation.
This is not a class but a meeting between two people who
don't have the same things at stake. Several versions follow
one another, with neither beginning nor end.
They have
been made with the help of a computer programme (2). This
software allocates to the keys conversational fragments
against a backdrop formed by images of the filming.
The
people chosen by the artist, on the basis of different social,
economic and cultural criteria, went ahead individually with a
representative montage of their function. The final
presentation of the various interpretations reveals at once
the social determinism, recurrent postures and certain facets
of the mental structure of the participants--the paranoid
journalist, the citizen student, the star cop, for example.
The staging of the exchanges highlights the artifice of all
words as well as the wealth of laws of condensation and
displacement, metaphor and metonymy in the construction
of each one and in each communication test.
Mélik Ohanian,
for his part, presents an installation in the form of futuristic,
user-friendly urban fixtures, placing the onlookers opposite a
screen, on either side of it. Pictures of the ground on Mars
taken by the Viking observation satellite and available on
the Internet, are put together to give the illusion of a broad
sweeping view of the planet's surface. This is a paradox that
makes the remotest of places become accessible from your
own home. The film is punctuated by several tracking shots,
as it is by the crackling of incrustations which file past, tone
over tone, like illegible subtitles.
A special device enables
onlookers to press "Pause", thus creating extensions to the
film by the subjective inclusion of fragments of
poetic-cum-philosophical text. This manipulation by viewers
is almost akin to the previous manipulation by the artist, an
interplay of combinations based on a rough capture of
reality. The film contrasts with the photographic status of the
imagery, an intuition about time, unalterable form filled by
changes. The shimmering abstraction beckons to us to
travel; everyone can thus reinstate snippets of narrative, and
imagine the conquest of Mars. In the end of the day,
inhabiting is constructing your time in space and taking
aesthetics not for a mere exhibition, but as a transposition
for life.
Céline Mélissent
Text:Céline Mélissent
Translated by Simon Pleasance
Image: Olivier Bardin.
vernissage/opening 25/01/02 > 18.30
Frac
4 rue Rambaud F34000 Montpellier
t +33 (0) 4 99 74 20 35/6/7/8/9
f +33 (0) 4 99 74 20 49