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Sonia Kacem - Bea McMahon

Dear Wattana
09.21.18 - 7:30PM
Performance — Carrosserie Sérignac

© PRINTEMPS DE SEPTEMBRE

PHOTO: FRANCK ALIX

SONIA KACEM with BEA MCMAHON, Dear Wattana' rehearsal 

Presented in the exhibition Éloge du carburateur, Sonia Kacem’s sculptural works are spread out in installations in which the elements are in tension in the exhibition space, evoking a suspended theatre scene, as if waiting for an action. Even though they are abstract, their titles suggest a fiction and invite the visitor to imagine his own narrative. It is not surprising that Sonia Kacem has started doing performances, experimenting via physical contact with the materials she uses. For Le Printemps de septembre, she invites the Irish artist Bea McMahon to engage in this artistic field and to present for the first time, a performance, outside of the intimacy of her studio.

 

In the performance Dear Wattana Sonia Kacem and Bea McMahon create a correspondence to Wattana, a Bornean Orangutan (from the Apenheul Primate Park in the Netherlands) renowned for her skills in tying complicated knot installations which she later dismantles. The two artists experiment the relationship gestures and materials. How can an object catalyse a movement? How can a body be handled by an object? "The knot goes way beyond the space in which it is supposed to bathe: it goes so far as to smash the classical relation between letter and image "(1). To understand the image it is necessary to become the image.

 

(1) Gilles Châtelet, Figuring Space, translated by Robert Shore and Muriel Zagha, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, ed. 2000, p.184.