exhibition

Carla Adra

Bouche

from 16 September to 31 October 2020

Le Local
For the fourth project in its program, the local invited the French-Canadian artist Carla Adra (born in 1993) to present a brand new installation at the Trésor, at the foot of the Reims Cathedral. Bouche is an exhibition in which visitors discover an intimate space at the heart of the cultural life of Reims. 
 
 
 
Turning the notion of identity into a complex and moving concept, Carla Adra fantasizes as coming from "elsewhere" and dreams of herself as "other". The video installation Bureau des pleurs, presented at the Lyon Biennale in 2019, is a form of total empathy, of constantly renewed attempts to become "the other", to become one with him, to appropriate its envelope and its most intimate memories. Driven by a desire both carnal and intellectual, Carla Adra moves, circumvents, refines or straddles the almost porous boundary between herself and the person she meets, producing a striking vertigo: what if the fusion became perfect? How then can one tell the difference between oneself and the other? Not without eroticism, the artist poses in her work the psychoanalytical question, as disturbing as it is exciting, of the potential disappearance of a being in the other.
 
The letters she writes and then seals in wood (Aire, 2017), addressed to the other as much as to herself, as well as the anonymous testimonies she collects from strangers (Bureau des pleurs, 2019) in the street or from children during performances (Ailes, 2019), reveal her relationship to the most direct form of narrative, without detours, without artifice, without witnesses or (self)censorship. Can we tell everything and to whom? How can we go beyond the conventions related to social interactions established in the public space - theorized by Erving Goffman in particular - by asking the other to surrender, here, now, with radical sincerity? 
 
Carla Adra speaks first, becoming contemporary Pythia, oracle of a fictitious temple, setting the tone for an intimate conversation that is often liberating. Although she works alone, her introspection nevertheless becomes collective. With each new piece, everything has to be reinvented; it is as dizzying as it is exhilarating. Carla Adra's particular attention to reality and its immeasurable narrative potential is the result of a performance that the artist describes as "pure". She observes the world while waiting for something to happen, on the lookout, ready to capture its poetic essence (Collection de vidéos, 2015-2020). For her, it is a matter of extracting a situation charged with invisible beauty, to transform it into a performance, text, video or image. Presented together in the in situ installation Bouche, the works from this sensitive corpus in turn produce a meta-narrative, which could be whispered, by candlelight, in a cave. 
 
 
 
Carla Adra (Canada) is recipient of the Cité internationale des arts Visual Arts Committees.
Practical Information

All the practical information on the Point Contemporain website.

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