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THE RIGHT TO SILENCE?

01/12/2021

 

 

THE RIGHT TO SILENCE?
30 December 2020 to 31 July 2021
Group show curated by Sozita Goudouna
SHIVA GALLERY New York

with works of Véronique Bourgoin and Juli Susin

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The film “Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender” by Véronique Bourgoin, is inspired by the true story of the poet and writer Lin Zhao.To make the film, I covered the walls of the 2m2 room with white paper and placed four cameras, one at each corner, recreating the four surveillance cameras that today surround Lin Zhao’s grave 24 hours a day. The action spanning approximately one hour, shows the evolution of a half-cyborg, half-tribal being, with a mask and a white lab coat in an enclosed space, and is transcribed in real time by the viewpoints of the 4 cameras. A ritual which puts energy and the body at the centre of the observation. The mask created for this action is a mixture of organic and inorganic elements: anti theft tags, electric wire, mirrors, plastic toys made in China, wood, hair, Paraguayan tribal necklaces, feathers, semi-precious stones, amber from Russia, etc, adorn the 3D glasses on which runs an FTP text of a return message with the subject: “Undelivered Email Returned to Sender”, in response to an email sent to an address created for the project. Over time, the drawing and the writing cover the walls and the floor of the cell, and is read like a diagram produced live by the electricity of the body transmitted by the organic conductors which still remain in this humanoid. The music that accompanies the film is composed by Afshin Motlaghfard an Iranian composer who currently lives in Iran and is unable to leave. The music has shaped in its majority by the ambient sounds that has extracted from the performance. In China it is said that people who have died in a violent or unjust way, or those who could not receive a proper burial, return in the form of a ghost. The only way to appease them and bring them justice is to bury them with dignity. The ceramic jointe in the project represents a ghostly being emerging from a chemical reaction in which the past and future are mixed together to create a majestic effigy of earth and enamels.

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The drawings by Juli Susin, belong to a series of 180 drawings created during confinement in Paris (Montreuil) between March and the end of June. The film The Snow (Les Mutants du Brouillard), takes its French title from a science fiction novel by Arcadi and Boris Strougatski which takes place in a nameless city, in an indefinite country, where the rain never ceases, and where the people suffer from a strange indefinable disease, and the children become superhuman geniuses scorning the corrupted human world. The film records intermediate states of the mutating monsters from a childlike and prophetic point of view.

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