| | | |  | | | | opus incertum, 2022 © Daniel Wagener | | | | | | | Luxembourg Photography Award 2023 | | | | 24 February – 16 June 2024 | | | | | | | Luxembourg Photography Award Mentorship 2023 | | | | 24 February – 7 July 2024 | | | Opening: Saturday, 24 February, 11 am
Exhibition organized in collaboration with Lët’z Arles a.s.b.l. | | |  | | | CNA Centre national de l'audiovisuel 1b, rue du Centenaire . 3475 Dudelange
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| | | | | | | | | |  | | | | Exhibition view at the Chapelle de la Charité, Arles © Armand Quetsch / CNA | | | | | | | Luxembourg Photography Award 2023 | | | | 24 February – 16 June 2024 | | | "Opus incertum" – a term borrowed from Roman masonry, which consists of building walls from small blocks, broken tiles, and a variety of bricks - is an in-situ installation created by Daniel Wagener in response to the call from Lët'z Arles for the 2023 edition of the Rencontres internationales de la photographie, in Arles' iconic Chapelle de la Charité.
The artist was confronted with a religious building, a place of worship steeped in memory, history, religious iconography, baroque workmanship, gold, stucco, fake and real marble, and symbols. He chose to react through extreme contrast and built a system of prefabricated shelves, industrial racks, crossing the main nave from left to right, filled with images of contemporary "construction sites", urban views, traces of buildings from the past and present. This modular unit for storing images obstructed the view of the altar and, by replacing the object of worship, became the artistic interface of a new cult of consumption. Through his exhibition the artist questions the nature of the icon in our contemporary society and encourages us to reflect on the place of the spiritual and its intersection with the material. | | | | | |  | | | | opus incertum, 2022 © Daniel Wagener | | | | | | Invited by the CNA/Pomhouse for the now traditional return of the arlesian exhibitions to Luxembourg, making the work accessible to the Luxembourg public who did not have the opportunity to visit Arles, the question arose of how to install "Opus incertum" in this new setting. The easy copy-and-paste solution was quickly abandoned. A new in-situ installation was conceived, with the generous support of the CNA, enabling us to rethink the scenography and produce new images.
Once again, we find ourselves in an emblematic location, a kind of industrial chapel without the altar and central nave, but equally rich in memory and history. In order to take full advantage of the fierce beauty of this hall, we opted for an installation of two industrial racks with a sort of factory gate in the middle, opening onto an image symbolizing a future that is either uncertain, joyful or troubling, and entirely in keeping with the artist's highly surrealist sense of humor. | | | | | |  | | | | opus incertum, 2022 © Daniel Wagener | | | | | | Daniel Wagener's questions, posed through the medium of his images taken on a daily basis throughout the cities and countries he visits, remain topical and prompt reflection on our consumption habits, our treatment of nature, the layout of our cities and our urban visions.
"Opus incertum" is also a tribute to the collective work and commitment of those who form society during the construction process, who ensure the transmission of methods and culture, and practice oral exchange in an exemplary show of solidarity, while remaining invisible. This element of the worker, absent as a human figure and yet very much present as an invisible actor - building and destroying - is particularly moving in this hall, this mecca of steel production in Luxembourg which now lies empty of all its contents, once so essential to the city and the country. "Opus incertum" portrays a new reality, seeks to document episodes of urban construction, uncovers what lies behind the ostentation, reveals what is no longer seen. | | | | | |  | | | | opus incertum, 2022 © Daniel Wagener | | | | | | It's the photographer's perspective, his framing, his sense of color that animate our perception. We see because he has seen. And we see what he wants us to see. His shots, seemingly neutral in appearance, lead us to reflect on our contemporaneity and evaluate it.
It’s a photography installation that promotes functional and pragmatic aesthetics. With an undeniable touch of humour, the artist invites the visitor to move these new icons – installed on warehouse trolleys – around the site, and to participate in the building work. He succeeds in creating a sublimation, an idealization of the functional.
Curated by Danielle Igniti | | |
| | | | | | | | | |  | | | | Rozafa Elshan, Point de départ 2, Arles, 2023. | | | | | | | Luxembourg Photography Award Mentorship 2023 | | | | 24 February – 7 July 2024 | | | Opening: Saturday, 24 February, 11 am
Exhibition organized in collaboration with Lët’z Arles a.s.b.l. | | | | | |  | | | | Rozafa Elshan, Point de départ 3, Arles, 2023. | | | | | | Today, let us take from our pocket a little piece of paper folded in two to find therein a few words of encouragement scribbled in pencil. – Approach the centre of the platform, position yourself dear guest and read aloud the invitation addressed to you.
HIC HIC SALTA! in 1 - 2 - 3 seconds; HERE NOW JUMP! on the platform set up upon the ground so that you may at last, weightless, exist in a brief present moment. Let us hush into this silence to rid ourselves of our dear personality and to create therein a poem.(1) Let us descend the rising current of all life in a single and unique inscription. The boards laid on the ground forming a horizontal invite to get as close as possible to things so as to experience, with the body, the event which, once secured, as soon escapes us.
At the scale of a tiny flake, leaning into the slope towards sensitive matter, it insists by shifting gesture upon a kind of verification. Let’s jump, let’s dance and slice this space-time so that we may populate and tighten the surface to which we cling. For the occasion of this exhibition and by means of a search through permanent passage, the guest empties once more their daily pockets so as to show to us their footholds upon this stage. By way of each leap, harried and constantly jostled, he passes the faces of a crowd to afterwards reject them outright (2). He would repeat this movement right to the bottom of the bag to weigh nothing in the end (3). Yet despite all efforts to strip away, something constantly looms in the palm of their hand. | | | | | |  | | | | Rozafa Elshan, Documentation de la planche, Molenbeek, 2023. | | | | | | In 1 - 2 - 3 seconds, we can try to situate this something by laying it down in the middle of the floor. Dvora’s laces, the sound of a thousand school bells or a handful of pits (4). As if we’d found ourselves in the midst of a field of celebration or a field of mourning, stricken by a peak or a trough, attempting to stop, grasp and retain, like a photographic prism, the present moment.
Now upon the high plateaus of this exhibition we may at last dance without closing our eyes. Today, on the contrary, if the guest could, they would become an all-seeing eye, so as to register, within, every detail of this perfect instant. Do they scream into the silence? No, they are breathtaken. Breathtaken by a life-changing something new. Smitten to the heart and paralyzed with emotion, they stand upon the stage, happy to have lived their whole life, happy to have suffered in their heart and above all in their body (5).
Here, it’s no longer a matter of knowing, but of living on the brink of all fields. Upon the count of 1 - 2 - 3 seconds, the deployment opens to show to what degree all can ceaselessly stop. Like a bird motionless in the sky, embodying in a single gesture statue and whirlwind (6), he would like to cancel everything (7) for a count of 1 - 2 - 3 seconds. — Now around the horizontal board, the attempt to string in a single motion a thread between earth and sky.
Fifteen images hung vertically that indicate, between silence and trepidation, the wake of a fleeting star. Floating and suspended, they bear witness, falling through pockets, the grating, the threshold, the stick, the box, the ball, the photograph, and the earth, to the best lit points of a shifting zone (8). Every time the guest decides to cut into the flux, we can follow their footsteps beneath which between Earth or Sky their fate plays out (9). In 1 - 2 - 3 seconds, they open then and there their hands and heart in full colour to just as soon empty these boards as the last to leave. To cancel everything so as to begin again to jump for joy and catastrophe. | | | | | |  | | | | Rozafa Elshan, Point de départ 1, Arles, 2023. | | | | | | As a conduit and by way of a stand-alone installation, Rozafa Elshan attempts to home in on a structure that constantly needs to be traced from a certain distance and depth. She is not free to build images from within an apparatus, but is constantly concerned with the conditions of a working process that have yet to take shape. By way of different grammatical and rhythmic orders, the work tends towards the manipulation of its own structures and insists upon experiencing, through the movement of the seeking-body, the possibilities, and limits, between the structure to be inscribed and the body to be laden, between the relationship to oneself and the relationship to the world.
All of this at a level of sensitivity that finds its fulcrum upon the ground zero of the everyday, our everyday landscape, where the image ripples forth from the experience of a shifting threshold that opens and unfolds the step. There resides in the present moment something insignificant and nameless that arises from the crossing of an interval to produce an imbalance, a crisis nearing the artist in motion.
What interests her is not the weight of things that obliges a turning around them, but the Circle in itself. A circle that is impossible to delineate, yet which must be drawn. Once it has been, it vanishes and one must just as soon start over (10). Within each context the installation acts like a new variation and constraint so as to loop the experience of the leap, the startle. As, according to her, the only way to touch upon a form of freedom and independence seems to be by roaming in motion that through which we hate to roam, motion being so painful (11). Given that motion so assails the rigidities, the certitudes and the values of the person who leaps to return to the shining thread.
Curated by Michèle Walerich
(1) Goethe, J. W., Zahme Xenien, III., C.H. textura, p.46.
(2) De Luca, E., Trois Chevaux, Gallimard, p. 52.
(3) Ibid., p.60.
(4) Ibid.
(5) Commengé, B., La danse de Nietzsche, Gallimard, p. 14-15.
(6) Didi-Huberman, G., La solitude des danseurs, Les Éditions de Minuit, p.97.
(7) Ibid., p. 114.
(8) Bergson, H., Réflexions sur le temps, l’espace et la vie, Payot, p. 40.
(9) Latour, B., Où suis-je ?, Les empêcheurs de penser en rond, p.114.
(10) Latour, B., Enquête sur les modes d’existence, La Découverte, p.342.
(11) Ibid., p.342. | | | | | |  | | | | Rozafa Elshan, Documentation de la planche, Schaerbeek, 2022. | | | | | | unsubscribe here
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