Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc

Born in 1977 in French Guiana, he lives and works in Paris.

The works that Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc has chosen to show at this printemps de Septembre deal with the issue of representation, linking it to absence. The series of photographs titled Location Unknown derives from Without Sanctuary, a book published in 2002. This latter contains a set of post cards produced in the United States between 1900 and 1930, depicting groups of men posing after racist lynchings. Erasing the hanged, charred bodies, the artist presents the faces of the torturers and gives us a glimpse of the codes bringing them together. The video that goes along with this series reverses the viewer's gaze. Borne off into the tropical forest, he follows a group of mysterious photograph hunters, and the exhibition room is illuminated by nothing more than their magnesium flashes. Visitors are thus flung into an impossible quest in the heart of a disaster area. With the work of Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, we are forever in search of a vanished image which we shall never find again. Without resorting to eloquence, he manages to cast doubt on the lines which divide make-believe from reality, while these boundaries tend to merge and then disappear.