"... Plumb with the site where it is held, with a 360 degrees vision and a sequence of uninterrupted images, the operator of the Khmiss Anjra’s sieve reconstitutes the memory of the place, rendered metaphorically in the panoramic landscape placed before his eyes. The device is rudimentary. A drum closed with a net at one edge, open at the other. Its inner wall constitutes the circular support of a visual narrative produced by the assembly of photographs taken in space and time: flashbacks of a moment before the souk.
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The sieve places the observing subject in close contact with the device. Contournedby the object, they must themselves physically manipulate it. The experience – the rhythm and the animation of the narrative – depends on their own performance, on the rotational movement of their body and the very manipulation of the drum. If we are given the illusion that the story takes place in an immediate and continuous present, the device, on the contrary, ruins the order of time by provoking the collision of a near past and of the present, the first substituting the second, one serving as a repulse to the other.
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The inversion and reversibility of time are at the foundation of the sieve and thus touch on the relationship between an observing subject and the outside world, beyond formal and narrative processes. They lean on a form of vision that accounts for a counterpoint that indicates a way of displacing, but also of engaging the gaze towards an event periphery, an off-camera necessary to recompose. It can thus be argued that this counterpoint constitutes an opportunity for reflexivity. It provokes a dialectical moment that makes it possible to think of the self in a network of anachronisms dismantling the spatial and temporal order of things and allowing to comprehend distant events together. It also manifests a stance, presumably a way of situating oneself in relation to a left-field. This position allows a different viewpoint within a given territory. It also expresses a philosophical or political will to overturn values or to reverse roles and powers.
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It is from this counterpoint that the founding artists of the FA / International Festival of Indigenous Art, have chosen to apprehend the souk, considered as a social fact and a total artistic event they are confronted with. Yet, in doing so, they allow themselves a lawless artistic freedom that lifts the boundaries between creation and reception, between artist and spectator, between merchandise and work of art, whose uses and statuses are interchangeable. The sieve is created for the first edition of the festival. Trickster object par excellence, it stages this game of objects’ displacement on the threshold of temporalities and registers of art and non-art. Implicitly, the sieve also becomes an interface towards established centralities in that it introduces a questioning of the dynamics between centre and periphery.
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Through various mediums and aesthetic choices, the proposals gathered in this exhibition have much to do with these concerns: the relationship to order, or to institutional norms, the hierarchy in art, and the mobility of artists from places of recognized centrality to peripheries (and vice versa). These issues encourage us to question the call for an exteriority of art and the role it plays in the definitions of the artwork, the artistic gesture and the object.
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