Galleries in Paris

May the tide come and take me further

Brittany, 1940 – date written on a document found more than ten years ago by the artist, after the death of an old aunt, alongside a 1925 Kodak box filled with negatives. It sounds like the beginning of an old black and white film. It’s a family story, marked by lies and things left unsaid, with a quisling grandfather as the main character. […] The artist may have erased part of his archives; these images nevertheless make it possible to fill in a “memory hole”, to dig beyond a family archaeology, a passage through a national and collective History that is still punctuated by the unsaid. Erwan Venn’s headless and bodiless characters are the ghosts of a collective memory that is still too often fading. […].

Extract from Agate Bortolussi’s text for the press release