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| Boris Achour |
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For L.F.D.A. 02Boris Achour’s installation Générique (“Opening titles”, 2000) offers one approach to his work: originally created with a view to a film, the work is a monologue delivered by a succession of voices, a text-Bible combining articles, extracts and song lyrics inviting the viewer’s interpretation, in the decor of a never-ending sitcom. A second piece, the splendidly-titled Jouer avec les choses mortes (“Playing with dead things”), presented at the Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers in 2003, marks another important step along the journey to Achour’s work for La Force de l’Art 02, featuring sculptures/accessories in a theatricalised space – at once stage, landscape and film location. A film projected onto a screen within the display presents five actors/mime artists/dancers handling sculptures with seductive, esoteric gestures. Working with Conatus, Achour’s 2008 pieces Conatus: AMIDSUMMERNIGHTSDREAM and Conatus: A Forest develop this exploration of the interface between film, sculpture and space, incorporating still more prominent, ritualised, choreographic elements. At the Grand Palais, Boris Achour takes this intriguing work-in-progress a stage further. A bedroom contains sculptures and a film shot in the building at night. We see a tap-dancer wearing a luminous mask, moving around the exhibition, contemplating and illuminating the works on show, gliding through empty space: the same dream-like, cinematic atmosphere, compounded of fragments, reminiscences and fantasies. Boris AchourThe work of Boris Achour, from his performances (Actions-Peu, 1993-97) to his most recent sculptures, videos and installations, undertakes to denounce the viewer’s social conventions. By playing on the viewer’s expectations and his disappointment, the artist brings out the fixed structures of an imagination he thinks to be "formatted". Proceeding through the reversal of declarations, his approach seeks to be a "gentle guerrilla" that, by overturning our ordinary perception of things, humorously opens our world to the infinite realm of the possible. [M.A.] Boris Achour was born in Marseille in 1966.
 Boris Achour |
