ART CITIES:Paris-Marie Bovo
For 15 years, Marie Bovo has been photographing views of natural and urban landscapes. She records a specific motif at intervals, making time a central subject matter. In several of Bovo’s series, such as the urban still-life scenery in “Algers” (2013), the intimate backyards in “Cour Intérieure” (2009) and the terraced roof tops of Cairo in “Bab-El-Louk” (2007), time is a protagonist that invokes a sense of infinite presence and sameness.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Kamel Mennour Arhive
Marie Bovo latest series “Cтансы” (Stances) series is on presentation at Galerie Kamel Mennour in Paris, the series was exhibited for the first time at Les Rencontres d’Arles in the Église Trinitaire in Arles, Marie Bovo began “Cтансы” in 2016, working in different trains, travelling long distances across Eastern Europe and Russia. At each stop, before seeing the landscape, the architecture, or the light that the doors would open upon, Bovo set up her camera in the narrow entryway of the train car. Before the doors closed, she would photograph the landscape beyond. The resulting images are the junction between the train and what is beyond its doors, giving the viewer a strong situational experience, recreating the sensation of Bovo’s body in space. Caught inside the architectural framework of the train car, the viewer looks out of the train’s windows while shifting across the vast Russian landscape. It is the landscape, rather than the train, that seems to be moving before our eyes. Inspired by the cultural representation of the region in its own literature, Bovo’s photographs evoke a solitude and poetic universe that reflect her passion for literature in general, and a hesitation to accept the Western point of view on Russia that is presented in the international media. Her choice to travel by train, a means of transportation often used by locals, also reflects her culture-specific starting point. Bovo excludes any anecdotes and overt aesthetic effects, focusing instead on the essential elements of the landscape beyond. She lets the train frame the images for her, capturing the eternity that is just outside the train window – trees, plains and houses – and in the extension of that, what is at the heart of the past and present of the Eastern European region. The time of year is important: every scenery is covered in snow. The snow changes the landscape’s atmosphere, covering it with a veil, erasing the horizon and removing most identifying marks. Roads and paths disappear, transforming the environment to a vast, tranquil mass. The usual traces of people in Bovo’s photographs have disappeared as the snow covers the echoes of human intervention, creating an abstract and poetic air. Remaining truthful to the landscape she sees, Bovo shows a Europe marked by the communist and post-communist era, neither taking part in the same history nor the same reality as the rest of the Western world. Also the film “Prédateur, La Danse de l’ours” is projected onto a cube the size of the animal, sets up a heartbreaking counterpart to this long voyage. Bovo filmed the images at Mychkine, in Russia, during a residency in 2008, before they were edited into their current form in 2015. Here the infinity of the territory is suddenly interrupted. The viewer faces a brown bear, retained in a cage so small that it has no room even to stand up, doomed instead to endlessly pacing back and forth.
Info: Galerie Kamel Mennour, 6 rue du Pont de Lodi, Paris, Duration: 8/2-10/3/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.kamelmennour.com
