ART CITIES:Paris-Bronwyn Katz
As a multi-disciplinary artist, Bronwyn Katz produces installations, sculptures, videos and performances. She takes an interest in contemporary forms of discrimination and exclusion as well as their political, social and psychic impacts. In her installations and sculptures, she tries to put together a collective history and memory linked to the spaces and objects around them.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Palais de Tokyo Archive
In Bronwyn Katz’s solo exhibition “A Silent Line, Lives Here” at Palais de Tokyo, a worn mattress is a recurring feature. By emptying it out of its contents and re-adapting it with the various materials that make it up (off-cuts of foam rubber, whirls coming from iron bed springs), she creates what Nicoletta Michaletos has described as being “ghost forms”. Bronwyn Katz thus connects the past with the present thanks to this object, while delivering a message which is quite abstract, based on a construction/deconstruction dialectic. In her performative videos, Bronwyn uses her heritage, her body and her mother tongue, Afrikaans, to offer alternative, fictional narratives as a resistance to univocal historical accounts. For her SAM Art Projects residency, the artist has conceived a series of installations and sculptures specially created for this exhibition. By pursuing her investigations and reflections about the politic issues of space, territories and sites, she has opened up a new field of thought, based on her experience of living in Paris. How to be elsewhere, yet visible here? How to bring out the elsewhere right here? It is such questions, which are as intimate as they are universal, that Bronwyn Katz has chosen to explore for her first solo exhibition in France. While the artist bases her work on precise investigations, her visual language is minimal, abstract and singular. “It is the material that dictates my practice” explains the artist, who creates mainly by using materials taken from used beds. According to her, sculpting these remains allows her to deconstruct reality and imagine new potentials, while preserving the residual memory and traces of human activities. The installations and sculptures which she deploys at Palais de Tokyo are a series of exhibits in a trial, materialising her poetic, political and social observations, of which she sparingly gives us a few subtle clues. The titles of some works, such as “Château Vert”, alluding to the Château Rouge neighbourhood in Paris, unveil the mapping of a geographic, mental territory, which will never be folded up on itself or shut-off. Enigmatic, but without being disturbing, these works refuse to be enclosed in their own meanings; their autonomous poetic forms invite us to the possibility of an encounter.
Info: Curator: Marie-Ann Yemsi, Palais de Tokyo, 13 avenue du Président Wilson, Paris, Duration: 22/6-9/9/18, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Sun: 12:00-24:00, www.palaisdetokyo.com
