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

Building on his experience and his years spent studying in London, Hassan Sharif developed intellectual relationships upon his return to Dubai in 1984, where he created a platform for art, discussion and engaged teaching. He obtained a space from the Sharjah government, which he named the Al Mureijah Art Atelier. Together with other artists, poets and playwrights, they gave birth to a new discourse on art that would produce a generation of artists. In 1987, the Ministry of Education approved Hassan Sharif’s new art studio project at the Youth Theatre and Arts in Dubai. Later, his house in Satwa became home to journalists, writers and artists.

Faced with the bitter observation that the region’s artists were almost totally ignored abroad and sometimes even in the Emirates, his brother Abdulraheem (an early supporter who documented and archived all the works of his brothers and their friends), proposed in 2007 to transform his house into a permanent exhibition space in order to show and share the ideas and art of Emirati artists. From the beginning he chose a museum-like approach to tell and present the contemporary art of the Emirates.

The Flying House was not conceived as a manifesto but rather as a laboratory exploring contemporary art practices, with workshops and meetings. An exhibition space (around 2500 works), was also a place of production and life for some. Abdulraheem Sharif secured the infrastructure to ensure daylight throughout the house, while an archive and preservation section provided access for art professionals and younger people.
Around personalities such as Hassan Sharif, his brother Hussein, Mohammed Kazem, Mohammed Ahmed Ibrahim and Joos Clevers, art lovers came from all over the world to discover the latest artistic achievements.

Until 2012, the Flying House was recognised in the region but also internationally as a place that presented and promoted a rich and singular culture,well beyond the skyscrapers of Dubai.

Lauren Marsolier      

Transition, an exhibition of photographic works by Lauren Marsolier, the first artist solo exhibition in Paris.

Lauren Marsolier creates spaces that are convincingly real using multiple photographs, unrelated fragments of the outside world collected over time in a variety of locations. Months or years often separate the capture of elements juxtaposed in her landscapes. Her photomontages are conceived using a personal photo library, following a process that is not unlike the way many painters make sketches at different locations and later combine them in a painting.

Her work probes the mental process of transition, a particular phase when our parameters of perception shift, when we suddenly don’t see ourselves, our environment, or our life quite the same way we used to. These transitional periods often feel like being in a place we know but can’t quite identify. As we try to adjust to a post-modern society marked by speed and the implosion of boundaries between image and referent, appearance and reality, we repeatedly get this feeling of disorientation and dissonance. We have been introduced to a new stage of abstraction, a dematerialization in which images and signs take on a life of their own, divorced from our former notions of the real. The loss of concrete connections to the objects of our senses creates a void within us, but it also unleashes a flow of new and elusive perceptions. Giving them the visual characteristics of a landscape is her way to explore them.

Located somewhere between fiction and reality, her images represent a mental landscape affected by a world of constant change. They show an unreality become manifest, transitional non-places where human action and inhabitation are recorded in strange antitheses of nature and artifice, or, better still, artificial nature and natural artifice.

French-born Lauren Marsolier lives and works in Los Angeles. She is the recipient of many awards including the 2013 Houston Center for Photography fellowship, where she had a solo exhibition. Her work was included in the ’31 Women in Art Photography’ 2012 selection by the Humble Art Foundation in NYC, ‘Looking at the Land’ at the RISD Museum of Art and also in the major 2013 London Exhibition ‘Landmark: The Fields of Photography’ at the Somerset House. Her images have been published internationally and the British Journal of Photography featured her as one of ‘20 photographers to watch in 2013’. Her first monograph ‘Transition’ has just been published by Kerber Verlag. On November 19, 2014, she will be part of a panel discussion about contemporary landscape photography at TATE MODERN in London, moderated by William A. Ewing with fellow artists: Thomas Struth, Penelope Umbrico, Massimo Vitali and Mishka Henner. She will also have a solo show at Galerie Richard in New York in Spring 2015.

Known for his work about darkness and light in spaces and architecture, the French talented photographer Eric Aupol focuses for the first time on the remnants of a genuine figure of the early twentieth century: Gaétan Gatian de Clérambault.

Clérambault was a famous psychiatrist (he will be the mentor of Jacques Lacan) and a photographer. He also taught the art of drapery at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris. As Chief doctor at the Infirmerie Psychiatrique Spéciale de la Préfecture de Police de Paris he had the opportunity to study numerous cases of mental disorders such as erotomania. He also developed a theory regarding some women’s erotic passion for fabric such as silk. The maréchal Lyautey asked him to establish a modern psychiatric facility in Morocco. Clérambault lived in Fès (1918-1919) where he took no less than one thousand photographies  all of which are drapery studies. He committed suicide in1934 at the age of 62.

This strange and mesmerizing exhibition is a tribute to Clérambault. It embraces four aspects of his achievements : The Studies of bodies and draperies are reminders of his classes at the Beaux Arts. Le quartier du Maristane is the Fès hospital  where Clérambault worked. Les pages tableaux and Les objets-outils.

Peter Neuchs explores through his works the density of everyday life. The most insignificant scenes take on a spectacular dimension in his large-format photographs. His “stolen” snapshots made with a mobile phone seem to deliver enigmatic fragments of a story that is yet to be deciphered and his watercolors with latent symbolism transform the banal in a suspenseful narration.
Some topics are recurrent in Peter Neuchs’ work. First there are women: he paints them alone in their bathroom, has photographed and drawn naked body parts, series of stomachs, bosoms, legs; capturing them in moments of absence, in front of a window, with their child or diving in the water. There are also landscapes, sublime in the meaning the Romantics gave to the word- this “pleasing feeling of horror” in the face of the immensity and the power of nature or, on the contrary, in front of the fragility and fugacity of a snowdrop. And finally the mysterious interiors- private setting or places of worship- where shadow and light reveal and hide. The notion of memento mori is very present; the here and elsewhere meet and merge in this enigmatic work, that continuously escapes any defining… Peter Neuchs’ entire work is marked by a questioning of Man’s relationship to the spiritual, to time passing, to the precariousness of Man’s being, to Nature. But the artist’s answers remain suggestions that leave the spectator to his own interpretation.

« Brief Encounters »
In 1945, David Lean’s film Brief Encounter opens on a conversation scene at a station buffet. Whereas the camera explores the tables, a couple comes out of the ensemble: they are the principal characters who are living in this trivial scenery, the premises of a sentimental drama about to occur. Here one finds the power of the unsaid, of the suggestion, that characterizes Peter Neuchs’ work.
It is in the banality of places he goes to everyday or that he passes by while travelling that Peter Neuchs captures theses brief encounters where a breach opens up; these fleeting moments of lucidity where the beauty and the intensity of life emerge from the everyday life.
The exhibition brings together several novel series that the artist has made since 2001, when he moved to Brazil. The photographs show a naked female body on crumpled sheets, a wilted flower at the foot of a suffering Christ, a windswept beach, a swimmer in the night or an empty corridor. The artist captures these instants of intimate communion where the material takes on a spiritual dimension.
Peter Neuchs’ images offer us a duality where the banal is exceptional and the everyday life eternal. But there is too much noise, blur or obscurity for the meaning perceived by the artist to be revealed without ambiguity. There is no expression to interpret, nor an obvious symbol, but a veil that covers these body parts or landscapes. If Peter Neuchs is as close as possible to his topics, he keeps a distance, cuts and offers fragments of them- as if the beauty, the breath, the sensations themselves escaped in an attempt to seize them. The topics’ triviality tints itself with mystery and melancholia – the spectator almost becomes the voyeur of brief silent encounters where the photographer was touched to the core.

L A T E   N I G H T   O P E N I N G : Friday October 31st from 6pm till 9 pm within the tour of MOIS DE LA PHOTO 2014

O P E N I N G :Thursday November 6th from 6pm to 9pm

L E C T U R E : Tuesday November 25th at 7.30pm : « L’intimité en question » (Questioning intimacy) with the participation of Jean-Louis Pinte, curator, Mois de la photo 2014 – L’Institut suédois. Free admission, please book in advance: www.institutsuedois.fr

The series « les espaces » (the spaces) marks a new step in the pursuit of Vitae nova, a project Eric Aupol started three years ago; (Laureate of la Villa Médicis extramural)

Accomplished in different European countries (Spain, France, Austria…), this series concentrates on staging areas, spaces of life or of work of migrants living in Europe, that the artist also photographed against the light (backlighting).  Spaces that seem at first glance meaningless, lifeless, framed on the threshold of description, but where, little-by-little, our gaze detects a certain nostalgia, a softness caused maybe by the physical absence of man.

This form of intimacy with the photographed inside space, both familiar and anonymous, conjugates with the silent withdrawal the photographer is wonted, evacuating every form of expressive pathos and of every narration.

In this treatment – more abstract than in the previous series (Clairevaux, Saissons…), quasi pictorial – as a result, nothing is ever called in a unequivocal way; And, like a signature in the work of Eric Aupol, the light plays a major role, impregnating this places, characterized as ordinary, of a pictorial and nagging warmth.