Ismaïl Bahri. Instruments
Espaço Cultural Porto Seguro, São Paulo
From 23 May to 05 August 2018
Extramural
Watch the video portrait:
The Jeu de Paume present the Ismaïl Bahri’s first major exhibition. Born in Tunis in 1978, the artist lives and works between Paris and Tunis. He works mainly with video although he continues to make drawings, photographs and installations. Ismaïl Bahri’s work is often produced from a series of operations featuring basic elements of everyday life, with the action stemming from the interaction between them: a drop of water, for example, placed on someone’s skin and reacting to arterial pulsations; a thread being wound in; or the fibres in a sheet of paper becoming permeated with ink.
With his attentive eye, his sense of detail and his taste for the enigmatic, the artist creates micro-events while at the same time questioning the conditions for their visibility.
“Instruments” presents a selection of his principal works along with two new works, conceived and produced for the occasion. This set of eight video works reflects the main themes running through his œuvre; such themes as fundamentals, duration, scale, and transformation, but also visibility and invisibility, mystery and solving the mystery. The exhibition seeks to develop a movement of progressive enlargement, starting with the intimate and leading outwards to landscape, light and a certain sort of abstraction.
Marie Bertran, exhibition curator
Curators: Marta Gili and Marie Bertran.
Exhibition produced by Jeu de Paume, Paris.
Espaço Cultural Porto Seguro
Alameda Barão de Piracicaba,
610 Campos Elíseos. São Paulo