Videos diffusion
Musée Dauphinois, 30 rue Maurice Gignoux, Grenoble.
Open daily (except Tuesday), 10:00–18:00
free entrance.


Anri Sala
2 - 28 February 2005
Born in Tirana in 1974. Lives and works in Paris.
“Over the years, a woman has accumulated and left behind her events, births, joys, misfortune, optimism, faith, fear, information, old newspapers, communism, disappointments, rebellions and, also, an interview, a silent interview – its sound had been lost – squeezed into two bits of film stock. The interview was made twenty years earlier, when this woman was one of the leaders of the Albanian Alliance of Young Communists. I forgot to say that this woman is my mother and that I found the interview in a box during a move. What was she saying twenty years ago? I started looking for witnesses to the interview so as to recover my mother’s words, but to no avail. The key was to read her lip movements. So I contact a school for the deaf and dumb. It felt strange, recapturing my mother’s voice in this silent school. Twenty years later, my mother was confronted with what she had said in that speech.”
(Anri Sala, text of the press release for the film).

Intervista, 1998, 26’
courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris


Sanja Ivekovic
2 - 31 March 2005
Born 1949 in Zagreb, where she lives and works.
Since the 1970s Sanja Ivekovic has used photography, video and performance to explore both the representation of the body and the place of the individual in society. In her video Personal Cuts we see Ivekovic cutting round holes in a mask made from a pair of black tights, interspersed with archive footage from a state television programme about the history of Yugoslavia. This work thus evokes an idea of collective memory that embraces both recollection and amnesia.

Personal Cuts, 1982, 3’40
courtesy of the artist


The Atlas Group (Walid Raad)
1st – 30 April 2005
Founded in 1999 in New York by Walid Raad (born 1967 at Chbanieh, Lebanon, lives and works in New York), Atlas Group Archive documents contemporary Lebanese history. Using texts, videos, performance and photographs, they try to analyse, track down and preserve the traces of this history. The work shown here is a “found” film from the Atlas archive. It shows a series of images, apparently a simple succession of sunsets, whose importance for the person behind camera no; 17 is revealed by the commentary.

The Operator #17 File: I Think It Would Be Better If I Could Weep, 2000, 6’, silent
courtesy Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London


Jean-Marie Teno
2 – 30 May 2005
Born in Famleng, Cameroon, 1954, lives and works in Issy-les-Moulineaux.
Moving between his homeland and western Europe, he films the “damage” done by modernity through the events and history of post-colonialism. The titles of his works Afrique, je te plumerai (Africa for the Plucking, 1992), La tête dans les nouages (Head in the Clouts, 1994), Clandestine (1996), and Chef (Chief, 1999) unambiguously spell out the issues that he is concerned with. Vacances au pays (Holidays in the Home Country) “exposes the empty promises of post-colonial modernity. The symbolic link to the culture of the West, represented by two solitary concrete towers in Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, is contrasted with the increasing degradation of the quality of life and the total lack of public services.” (Mark Nash, “Jean-Marie Teno”, in Documenta XI_Platform 5: Austellung/Exhibition, Kurzführer/Shortguide, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2002, p. 222)

Vacances au pays , 2000, 75’
courtesy of the artist


David Claerbout
1st - 30 June 2005
Born in Kortrijk, Belgium, in 1969. Lives and works in Berlin and Antwerp.
David Claerbout’s videos often show simple images animated by a long, slow movement. In Ruurlo Bocurloscheweg, 1910, the artist reuses a photograph of a Flemish landscape taken in 1910. A tree is shaken by a barely perceptible wind. This exploration of representation hesitating between photography and the moving image refers directly to the great tradition of Flemish landscape painting. Claerbout invites us to contemplate both the image and its duration.

Ruurlo, Bocurloscheweg, 1910, 1997, 10’, silent
courtesy Micheline Szwajcer Gallery, Antwerp


Valérie Mréjen
1st - 30 September 2005
Born in 1969 in Paris, lives and works in Paris
Valérie Mréjen is a writer and video artist who collects stories. She states, “My videos, even if they show people who talk about events they really lived, are worked on, sometimes rehearsed, with attention paid to form, all in the name of creating a precise account - short accounts, closely related to the person who tells them, from which emanate an idea about life, about the world.”
“In the series Portrait filmés (14 souvenirs) [Filmed Portraits (14 Memories)], I asked friends or people I know to give an account of a memory: recent or old, revealing or trivial, the first one that comes to mind or one that requires stewing for a while, but a memory that has a particular meaning. Sitting and facing the camera, each person tells their story.”

Portraits filmés (14 souvenirs), 2002, 13’30’’
Courtesy the artist and Galerie cent8-serge le borgne, Paris


Maria Marshall
1st - 31 October
Born in 1966 in Bombay, lives and works in London
The artist creates minutely worked films that tend to be of a striking formal beauty and can be compared to mini Hollywood productions. But a shift occurs between this formal beauty and the story that is told. Behind the perfect formal appearance, the artist investigates our moral principals and our ideas about the world.
Playground, 2001, presents a white Christian church under a blue sky. A boy kicks a soccer ball at the church. On closer study, the viewer realizes that the image has been retouched. The ball has been erased, creating an ambiguous situation, compounded by the sound and shadow of the ball. A simple game or an investigation that places youth confronting the Institution, Authority, History ?

Playground, 2001, 10’
Courtesy Pierre Huber Collection, Geneva


François NOUGUIÈS
2 - 30 November
Born in 1969 in Montpellier, lives and works in Paris.

The artist photographs or films himself in simple but unusual actions, chosen for the visual or emotional impact they can create. He executes them alone, in the privacy of his studio, and later, with others in public space. He fabricates objects that relate to the body. He has widened his field of research to the social body and the city. The recording of his actions play an important role in the work, the artist is interested in what the camera can capture and how its presence modifies behavior.
The artist comments regarding Discusson entre un père et un fils (Discussion between a father and son), “I ask my father to show me his weapons. He is not a cop, not a soldier, he just lived in Algeria in 1962. He never wanted to talk about that period of his life. I created an intimate framework in which we could talk about it, I don’t demand anything of him, we talk.” The fixed camera frames the weapons and the arms of the two men. The viewer witnesses their conversation that evades any handing down of the family’s history.

Discussion entre un père et un fils, 14’20’’
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris