THE TWIN SHORES OF AGNÈS VARDA

Date: October 30 2012 - April 7 2013
Exhibition organized by the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo
Sponsored by: Institut Français
In collaboration with: Sevilla Festival de Cine Europeo
Exhibition Session: Surround Action: Conceptual Peripheries

Having filmed the seaside and the beach so much, I could be taken for a specialist. Here I show a photo of the sea and we can imagine the wind which, at that moment, whips the crest of a wave up into jets of water. I also propose that the movement which continues the image is cinema, another representation of the seaside, we hear the last wavelet that comes and flattens itself on the sand, well, the sand is real sand, it's reality.

But I also really like trees, mosses and fig leafs, cats, and potatoes, heart-shaped ones above all. As for death, widows bear the burden of it. I've met some on the island of Noirmoutier. Wives of sailors, wives of sorrows, as the local expression has it. I've done fourteen portraits of them. I've created a way of presenting them: they surround a central image, as in old polyptych paintings. Each visitor is invited to listen to one or the other of them, in private, each person will recognize in these more or less old women a mother, aunt or grandmother, or a neighbour.

Another project in the exhibition is to show a film in response to an enigmatic photograph. Every image questions us. The gaze is tantamount to curiosity, empathy and, at times, the play of imagination. One day in 1956 some people were captured by my lens in a surprising configuration, as if staged. This is Le terrasse du Corbusier (Le Corbusier's Terrace). Who were they? What were they doing there? And why on that day? This photo has inspired and prompted me to invent a history for these unknowns. I've filmed Les Gens de la Terrasse (The People on the Terrace) by inventing the three or four minutes prior to and after the clicking of the shutter.

An exhibition is an open notebook, a sheaf of disparate notes, but it's a single person who expresses him- or herself in a discontinuous, contradictory way. The diversity of this gathering of my works is something I stand by. It enables me to share my impressions with different, more or less intrigued and sensitive people of diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. I would like the encounter to take place between these representative works of mine and the people of Seville.

Agnès Varda

ADDITIONAL DOCUMENTATION

· Leaflet [pdf file: 1.85MB]

· Agnès Varda: The Twin Shores [pdf file: 62KB]

· Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes: The Twin Shores of Agnès Varda [pdf file: 63KB]

· Exhibitions Labels [pdf file: 522KB]

· Links:

· Ciné-Tamaris

· Sevilla Festival de Cine Europeo - IX Edition

· Bibliography:

· The Beaches of Agnès Varda [Cat. Exhibition Art Museum of the Central Academy of Fine Arts & Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2013]

· Maïthé Vallès-Bled (comisario). Agnès Varda. Y'a pas que la mer [Cat. Exhibition Musée Paul Valéry de Sète, editado por Au fil du temps, 2011]

· Agnès Varda: l'île et elle [Paris, Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, 2006]

IMAGES

· Photo Album on Flickr

· High Resolution Images

PRESS

· Press Dossier [pdf file: 100KB]