Alain Laframboise / Ian Paterson
Théâtres pour voir

Vernissage on June 11th at 6:00 pm in the presence of the artists.

Presented last February in Sarajevo as part of the international event Citizen of Metropolis, the fourteenth edition of Sarajevo Winter, this exhibition brings together several photographic series produced between 1982 and 2996. This perspective aims to show the recent development of two artistic practices that are real areas of experimentation in photography and that both draw their issues from the slow process of sedimentation.

For Alain Laframboise and Ian Paterson, who have come to photography without any particular interest in its technical mastery, the “point of view” (this radical constraint) is an assigned place that seems to impose a tension between the desire to be passive and the desire to tinker. Their works then summon the viewer to a strange spectacle: that of the action of contemplation. A set, which has become the stage of a shadow theatre, is taken not to show a drama (the characters are surprisingly absent from it) but to take the spectator into the almost stagnant thickness of time.

If the action of time that the photograph records here is a work in ruins, this action is strictly framed by a vision device that neatly counters any nostalgic drift. The visible is nothing more than a scene; the violence or languor that plays out in it is sometimes based on hazardous configurations (clouds, places of passage and wandering), sometimes on constructions that refer to the fragile scaffolding of children’s games.

This exhibition was conceived in collaboration with the Embassy of Canada in Bornia and Herzegovina.

A publication accompanies the exhibition. Text by Daniel Arasse.