Exhibition Ghost Dance
"The Ghost Dance exhibition brings together eleven artist that graduated from the Aix-en-Provence Higher Art School in 2020. Their works are showcased in the old wine cellar which was converted into an art Gallery. The works of this generation of artists echo a world from which physicality and corporeality seem to have suddenly evaporated, both as a result of the global health crisis.
In the 1983 film Ghost Dance produced by British director and artist Ken McMullen, actress Pascale Ogier, an icon of the 1980s, questions the philosopher Jacques Derrida and asks him if he believes in ghosts. He replies that a ghost is the memory of something that has never been present: “as soon as I am asked to play my own role in a more or less improvised film scenario, I have the impression of letting a ghost speak for me. [...] and that’s maybe the most fun. [...] I believe that the futurs is in ghosts, and that modern technology of image, cinematography, telecommunications, tenfold the power of the phantoms. "Through their productions, these artists attest that the sensitive experience of the world is now experienced through multiple layers of heterogeneous realms and filters which can distort and alter raw sensation. The works presented here are located in interstices among several combined realities, precisely where the boundaries between the real and the virtual become explicit.
Particularly attentive and sensitive to the questions running through society, these young artists share their observations of the failure of science in their attempt to explain the world.
Paradoxically, various means are offered by fiction, diversion, illusion or even different forms of memories which they seize in order to establish a connection between us and the world we inhabit. Faced with the catastrophes that succeed one another and tend to paralyze us, these artists aim to escape a horizon of death by amplifying and diffusing life pulses whose faint lights sparkle among the spectra. In the heart of darkness, they invite us to dance, and this dance is "nothing but a communal dance of desire."
