Natalie Tsui (they/them) is a non-binary artist primarily working in film, video, and performance.
Pauline Bastard is a French artist born in 1982. Her practice includes film, video, video installation and sculpture. Through videos and objects she explores the poetic potential of established order of things and image uses.
She graduted from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, and La Sorbonne where she also taught. She has been showing her works in a variety of galleries and group shows for the last few years, including a duo show with Roman Signer at Blank art space an a solo show at Eva Hober Gallery in Paris. She participate to different residencies in France (Mains d’oeuvres), Germany (Pact), Colombia (UN) and the United States (NYU).
“I like the way image transports things and transforms them, the way it reduces them in a manner but exists as object independently of the reality that it represents, I like thinking how much scales confront through it, for instance:
On the beans cans which I buy in my supermarket there is a drawing of a small red farmhouse, someone told me that it is Vermont. Also, to express the notion of the time which passes, so difficult to encircle, my computer makes appear a clockwise spinning pie in color of the rainbow, and I understand it.
I see in our relationship with image an immense poetic and philosophic breeding ground, we admit a heap of representations without looking at them, as well as we contemplate a heap of clichés without thinking even of their origin, nevertheless that seems to me important and interesting.
Our faculty to understand the image intrigues me, I imagine that it may have the same impact on our way of thinking as the language has, we learn the images as we learn to speak, and my work is as the philosophic exercise which consists in realizing the strangeness of the language by repeating constantly a word until its abstraction, I try to make the strangeness of the images appear and by extention, the poetry to live with them, I thus try to show these innumerable filtres, layers, residues produced around the image and its use, which we know so much that it is invisible, this by using its own strategies and of course the raw material, the image, existing, rescued, available, within reach of my hands everywhere. My gesture is simple, it is described as an estrangement of the usual function of the images and the use of representation to give them a kind of autonomy. It is little as a mutiny towards function, it is little as to choose to be an artist. At the same time, I am only going in the sense of exsistant images, I just push the process one step further, the small rainbow pie already spin, the farm of the Vermont is already on the box, I just find role for these representation in my videos or in my installations, there they participate in a new representation, and it is what is the most poetic: As the word that we repeat in the exercise, we put in danger something fundamental, the language, and it creates an incredible dizziness, we repeat it and after a while we realize that it is insane this appelation, so we atteind a kind of vertiginous border which questions untill our relationship to the world, nevertheless we return in normal, we reuse the word, we have to… I look for something similar, I destructure the image, I show its stratagems, in “Beautiful landscapes” for instance, I accumulate photos of beautiful torn landscapes, a landscape is worth the other one and the images are disemboweled, and nevertheless, in spite of this insult, the paper visible, the poor material shown and the emphasis put on the commonness of the centring, the landscape becomes again photogenic, the tears become the crests of new mountains, and we start again contemplating. It is this crazy choice, to take refuge with the image, even by knowing, this decision begun with full knowledge of the facts to dive into the illusion, it is there that I want to take people, it is for this choice which seems to me crazy, poetic and brave that I make my work!”