Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil

Born in 1968, he lives and works in Paris.

Ever since the early 1990s, Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil has been mining a rich vein of themes in relation to disappearance and our contemporary obsession with security. “When I was still a student at art school,” he recalls, “I couldn’t leave home without walking past a CCTV camera. One of the first projects I worked on consisted in itemising all the videosurveillance cameras in my own and neighbouring districts.” In his photographs, videos and installations, Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil shows how our freedom is “monitored.” More generally, he critiques the reductive, monocular vision provided by current communication technologies.

The Day Before_Star System comprises a series of twelve photos which use software to reconstitute the heavenly vault the night before notorious bombing raids. Each sky gives the name of the city that was bombed and the date and time of the attack, rather in the manner of military aviation archivists. Memories are stirred by the sadly famous names of Caen, Guernica, Dresden, Nagasaki and Baghdad. The periods differ, but these nights are all alike in their evocation of destruction and death.