Excursion – Pauline Rheims, 2019
Excursion proposes a journey inside the photographic image. Taken at the Aquarium de la Porte Dorée in Paris in September 2019 and reworked a few months later, this image shows an enlargement of a photo of a coral, it becomes a space which we explore.
Situated between the depths of the sea and the surface of the image, the video invites contemplation and pushes to a renewed attention to the living unfolding under our eyes.
This change of scale makes us see it in a new light, giving it a mysterious, almost extraterrestrial dimension. It allows us to see the complexity of life from a perspective, usually unattainable to humans. The sound, produced by David Cukier and Antoine Gaillard, is a loop, which changes as the video progresses. It adds to the contemplative dimension and underlines the imperceptible variations of this coral.
The representation and the attention paid to the forms of life, which could escape us, seem to be a condition for a care whose benefit is not limited to humans, but thinks the relations and the interdependences between human and non-human.
Pauline Rheims graduated from the École Nationale des Beaux Arts in Lyon, in 2019, with a degree in photography and video, and subsequently from the School of Graphic Research in Brussels in October 2021 with a master in graphic design. Her relentless questioning of the signs and codes related to images, has been combined, over time, intuition, analysis and sensitivity. Sometimes very discreet, to the point of being barely visible, her interventions can also voluntarily reframe, and therefore modify the meaning of the images they show. Keen to avoid creating instructive content, Rheims wishes to generate evocative matter, her multimedia approaches position the uncertainty of our gaze at the heart of the banality nested in the clichés that she affections, beyond the simple mechanisms of the nostalgia.
Pauline Rheims graduated from the École Nationale des Beaux Arts in Lyon, in 2019, with a degree in photography and video, and subsequently from the School of Graphic Research in Brussels in October 2021 with a master in graphic design. Her relentless questioning of the signs and codes related to images, has been combined, over time, intuition, analysis and sensitivity. Sometimes very discreet, to the point of being barely visible, her interventions can also voluntarily reframe, and therefore modify the meaning of the images they show. Keen to avoid creating instructive content, Rheims wishes to generate evocative matter, her multimedia approaches position the uncertainty of our gaze at the heart of the banality nested in the clichés that she affections, beyond the simple mechanisms of the nostalgia.
