DOORS 7PM FREE
Book Launch + Artist in Conversation
Shoair Mavlian (Assistant Curator, Tate Modern) will talk to Alix Marie about her first book published with Morel Books.
The challenging project of Bleu is to translate Alix Marie’s three-dimensional approach to photography into book form.
Marie’s practice merges sculpture, photography and installation. Her work explores our relationship to bodies and its representation through processes of objectification, fragmentation, magnification and accumulation.
The work sits in contemporary discourses around the theory and history of the photographic medium. Marie uses technology’s advances to print onto various materials from PVC plastic to cardboard, glass or fabric. The digital is used here to push photography towards a physical and visceral experience. Images are often shot, printed and arranged in an installation or three-dimensional form in order to be photographed again. The photograph is considered first and foremost as object and is explored through its potential for materiality, touch, and three-dimensionality. The work investigates the similarities between skin and the photograph: both surfaces, both fragile, both filled with secrets and taboos.The impossibility of grasping a body is inherent to the medium of photography as much as to human relationships, yet in doing both at once, the insatiable is soothed. There is vampirism in this quest, and often images and prints are reused, as the monster of photography feeding off itself. The violence in the photographic take, the impulse of possession develops into frustration with the print, which needs to be digested again, reshaped, crinkled up, re-photographed, reworked in a Sisyphus like never ending task.
Alix Marie (b.1989) is a French artist based in London, working across the mediums of photography, sculpture and installation. She graduated from Central Saint Martins College in 2011 with a first class honours degree in fine art and later completed an MA in photography at the Royal College of Art. Since 2009, Marie has been featured in exhibitions internationally and has taken part in residencies in Slovenia (2012), Morocco (2013), Scotland (2014) and Iceland (2017). She was recently selected for the 11th edition of Foam Talent Call and will be featured in the travelling Foam Talent exhibition that will launch in Amsterdam on 31 August 2017. In 2018, Marie will have a solo show as part of the Düsseldorf Photo Weekend after winning the prestigious 2017 Portfolio Review Award.