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Since the early 1990s the French artist Sylvie Blocher has built up a body of video work that takes the human as its material – one that is fragile and unpredictable but charged with extreme presence. She deploys a "poetics of relations", of emancipation, questioning identities, the writing of history, the presence of femininity in the male body, codes of representation in a world under control. Her works are created in various geographical contexts (Europe, North America, Brazil, India, China, etc.) and are conceived in terms of exchange: they involve the participation of outsiders invited to speak or act in front of the camera, the artist sharing her "authority" with the "models" in order to create what she refers to as Living Pictures.
The exhibition she has devised for Mudam revolves around an ambitious project entitled Dreams Have a Language, combining participatory work, video installation and ilm production. During the irst weeks of the exhibition, the Grand Hall of the museum will be transformed into a ilm studio with activity related to a flying machine. Through an advert in the media Sylvie Blocher is inviting those who so wish to come to the museum in order to leave the ground and "rethink the world". The images of suspended bodies are screened in a video installation at the centre of the exhibition, while the encounters with the participants will be the starting point of a ilm combining documentary and ictional writing co-directed by Blocher and Donato Rotunno, the release of which is scheduled for spring 2015.
In the galleries on the basement floor, the exhibition includes about ten recent works that highlight various issues central to Sylvie Blocher’s work: identity, otherness, the power of the imagination, the concept of "wasted time" and that of "shared responsibility" between the artist and the people she ilms. By reactivating, in musical mode, speeches and important manifestos from contemporary history, the ive videos that make up the series Speeches (2009–2012, Collection Mudam) are thus related to the political dimension of imagination. Other works, such as the diptych Change the Scenario, (Conversation with Bruce Nauman) (2013), and the three videos the artist recently produced in Texas, deal with the historical and conflicting aspects of the construction of the subject. As a prologue to each of the galleries, a series of drawings on the front pages of the newspaper Libération, that the artist sketched on a daily basis over a period of a year, focuses on how the artist’s practice constantly toes and froes between the personal and the political.