Screening of short films by six student artists or graduates of the School: Joon Yoo, Valentin Ranger, Elfie Mahé, Enzo Perrier, Jérémie Danon, Anaïs-Tohé Commaret.
The screenings will be followed by a discussion with the artists.
The programme has been devised and put together by Alice Narcy, curator and director of Premiers Films.
Joon YOO - UNIVERSE MEMORY - (9'25")
South Korea. 1985.
Joon YOO explores the confrontation between the subjective perception of time and the objective notion imposed by a progress-oriented system.
For her, the musical score is like a metaphor for the society that follows rigid conventions. She seeks to make music more flexible and accessible to all.
In 2019, during her stay in the Atacama Desert, she experienced an almost inaudible electronic sound that made her question her movement. During her residency at the Fiminco Foundation, she created 21 prints to represent this experience, breaking with the usual linear conception of musical time. In 2023, she created a video of the same name to express her own subjective experience of time through narration and sound. She seeks to explore the collective dimension of time by asking the questions "What does time produce?" and "What is eternity?
The sound composition has been designed to give the impression of air sculpture through resonance, allowing an exploration of the porosity of time with each sound element - voice, sound effects, electronic instrument - inviting the viewer to explore their own feelings through the music. This immersive experience encourages a brief contemplation in an immaterial dimension, for a moment of calm and reflection.
Valentin Ranger - Infectia Orgasma Symphonia
Go to the Meta Hospital, the 4th part of a series of 3D modelled and painted films forming a speculative world, called Infectia Orgasma Symphonia. Made up of dozens of bodies and intuitive encounters, the Meta Hospital is criss-crossed by a river of virtual blood. Here, entities are searched, examined, penetrated and treated. The virtual blood flows into an environment that binds bodies together, allowing them to regenerate, discover each other and construct new narratives. The film is accompanied by music by composer Ines Cherifi.
Valentin Ranger was born in 1992 and works between London and Paris. After several years studying theatre, he graduated from the Beaux Arts in Paris and the Royal College of Art in London in 2023. He won the Agnès B prize in 2020 and the Prix Spéciale du Jury at the Bourse des Révélations Emerige 2022. His work has been shown at the Reiffer Art Initiative, FAB/Galerie du Jour, Galerie Sultana, Frac Île de France and Villa Noailles. He is preparing his first solo show in London at the Zabludowicz Collection (Invites Program) at the end of November 2023, and his first solo show in Paris in 2024 at the Mor Charpentier gallery.
Elfie Mahé
Elfie Mahé's work brings together film, silver photography and sculpture. These three different practices are born from the same appetite for reality. Whether printed on film or in plaster, film and moulding keep an imprint of what surrounds us. From this reproduction, a reflection can begin: what is it that we are trying to capture, why and how is it represented?
Her favourite themes are the body, nature and intimacy. Each of his projects revolves around the question of desire and all the ambiguous, shameful or sublime feelings that arise from it. Moulding, photography and film are thus fragments of what excites the eye. Desire induces our actions, our dreams. Desiring reveals our way of being in the world.
Since the arrival of social networks in our daily lives, our relationship to our image has been turned upside down. Camera lenses have become magnifying mirrors and we are constantly confronted with our own reflection and that of others. Between documentary and fiction, her video is presented as a usual discussion between several teenage girls, comparing themselves to an Instagram influencer, a new figure linked to the explosion of the social network. The daily life of the latter is confronted with a more tumultuous life where everything is a pretext for envy. The girls, however, aware of the illusory reflection of our screens, quickly develop a natural, but unhealthy, behaviour in the face of a staged and deceptive life. A life far from the high school of Manon, Sheila and Sonia. While surfing on Instagram, the teenagers oscillate between jealousy, glorification and despair. How can they build themselves up in the face of these smooth, individualistic and uniform images?
Enzo Perrier - The Ogres, 2021 (3'18)
Enzo Perrier is a student at Via Ferrata (preparatory class for the Beaux-Arts in Paris). His work focuses mainly on photography, film and installation, questioning the construction of identity, stereotypes and solitude.
Two men struggle and cling to each other in a clinical setting. Their embrace suggests that the origin of the conflict is more complex than a simple game of egos. Short film directed and developed within the associative laboratory, "L'Abominable".
Jérémie Danon - Plein air
Through hybrid forms that bring together fiction and documentary, Jérémie Danon thinks of video projects as opportunities for extraordinary protagonists of the ordinary to speak and to be heard. Thanks to their strong narrative potential, they help him to question reality.
His work has been awarded contemporary art prizes such as the Sarr jury prize at the CRUSH exhibition at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, the carte blanche student prize during Paris photo, and the jury prize of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne for contemporary art. More recently, he received the Artaïs prize at the 72nd edition of the Jeune Création festival. Jérémie was also rewarded for his cinematographic work by receiving the jury prize for the best French short film for his film Afrokingdom at the Champs-Elysées Film Festival.
As part of his projects, Jérémie has been involved as a volunteer in the Jean Wier plastic expression workshop at the Eps - Erasme psychiatric hospital for two years. He then led mixed practice workshops to help people reintegrate into society after incarceration: Plein air was born from these meetings. The film Plein air is now part of the collections of the Italian foundation Fondazione In Between Art Film and of the collections of the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris - MAM. He is now extending this project with a series of images made with a camera, in close collaboration with the publishing house The Eyes Publishing, for the publication of a monograph in 2024.
In June 2022, for his solo exhibition at the Pal project gallery, he presents a multimedia installation composed of projections on paintings and 3D prints with sound. For the Biennale de Paname at 104 Paris in September 2023, Jérémie Danon is currently preparing a new installation using an artificial intelligence engine to produce images that will dress up paintings made by the artist.
Plein air features individuals in rehabilitation. Having been released from prison, they now find themselves in a different kind of freedom from the one they knew before their detention.
Transformed by the experience of captivity, they take a new look at this newfound world, where they come up against the harshness of a system that is ill-suited to their situations and the limited employment opportunities it has to offer.
After spending time with them, Jérémie Danon invited five former prisoners to speak on a green screen; this device allows him to present their testimonies while decontextualizing them from reality, by means of imaginary spaces.
From the mythopoetic world of Falkreath The Elder Scrolls to that of the action adventure game GTA V, these computer-generated settings from video games were chosen according to their answers to the question: "Where would you like to be now? Their lush, virtual natures contrast both with their past captivity and the new hostility of the reclaimed, concrete city.
In the midst of these machinima spaces, they bear witness to the displacement and the impossible return to reality that they experience. Plein air attempts to shift the gaze on people in rehabilitation while addressing without taboo the flaws of an established system that refuses to question itself.
Anaïs-Tohé Commaret
Anaïs-Tohé Commaret explores the sensory potential of the film medium and her work is defined by a back and forth between fiction and documentary. She won the jury's "Coup de Coeur" prize awarded by the Mac Val, the Palais de Tokyo and Lafayette Anticipation at the Montrouge Contemporary Arts Fair in June 2022. Her vaporous and phantasmagorical universe stems from a fascination for characters she defines as anti-heroes/ghosts who are beings who wander between the intervals, looking for a place to feel good. At the same time, she worked as an erotic dancer in a Parisian cabaret. From this experience, a new form of questioning in her approach was born around the capitalist system, work and the self-sufficiency of TDS.
Penser le Présent est réalisé avec le soutien de Société Générale.
Amphithéâtre des Loges – 14 rue Bonaparte, Paris 6e
Free admission subject to availability
