Another Point of View
La Galerie, Paris, France
Seeing photographs in an exhibition that picture the exhibition venue itself can arouse a feeling of the uncanny, even more so when the space is a 19th-century mansion. (Sigmund Freud’s term, unheimlich, which was developed in his 1919 essay on ‘The Uncanny’, stems from the root heim or ‘home’). Curated by Carolina Grau, ‘Another Point of View’ comprises images taken from former archives as well as recent photographs that simulate archival documents. As a guest curator, Grau spent a few weeks in residency in the Paris suburb of Noisy-le-Sec, a former Communist stronghold, where La Galerie sits amid high-rise housing blocks. This setting of housing and functional units suffuses the exhibition.
At first sight, Marcelline Delbecq’s photographic display, Des Alentours (Hereabouts, 2010), reveals two images lain on a shelf. The first image is a view of the mansion that houses La Galerie, taken from the 16th-storey of a nearby tower block. The second image zooms in on the duckboard surrounding the house. Its bottom right corner reads: ‘Surprising though it may seem, no one hereabouts had noticed anything at all. So much so that the day after…’ Look more carefully, and you discover that another image is printed on the back of each photograph, though it remains unseen. The place within the place yields a possible fiction – perhaps a murder scene, or a mental space where one thing becomes its opposite. Although the location is recognizable or even familiar to the visitor, Delbecq’s pictures of the building from an unexpected point of view create a dissonance within the work and the exhibition space itself.
Delbecq’s bird’s-eye view echoes that of Józef Robakowski’s film, From My Window (1978–99), shot from his apartment in a Łódź housing block. A voice-over narrates the movements of the filmmaker’s neighbours: the director of the meat factory before and after being fired, or the forlorn car parked in the same place for two years become pretexts to allude to shortages, black markets and internment, as well as the history of Poland from Communist times through the transition era. Although the voice-over – which is spoken in the present tense seems – simultaneous with the action, the track is actually a single recording, narrated afterwards. Robakowski’s personal archive is exists ambiguously in both past and present.
Historical archives are also manipulated in Amie Siegel’s video installation Berlin Remake (2005). Working with the film archives of the former GDR state cinema, Siegel discovered sequences from a number of films set in pre-reunification East Berlin. Through a dual-channel installation, the artist returns to the places depicted in the films to shoot them again, adopting a similar point of view. She juxtaposes past and present images and puts archives stemming from fiction beside restaged sequences. As fictitious and documentary images collide, the locations remain deserted.
In this exhibition, Noisy-le-Sec, Łódź and Berlin are never seen from a straight documentary point of view. The manipulation of documents through fictionalization, voice-over and juxtaposition makes their status highly ambiguous. As Freud wrote in ‘The Uncanny’, the feeling of the uncanny ‘cannot arise unless there is a conflict of judgment as to whether things which have been “surmounted” and are regarded as incredible may not, after all, be possible.’
Audrey Illouz
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