Lindsay Seers

For the festival this British artist is making a video and sound installation inspired by the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, to be shown in the Pilgrims’ Room of the chapel in the Hôtel Dieu, a historic hospital symbolized by the scallop shell of the pilgrims to Compostela.

Lindsay Seers’ artistic practice is like a poetic and visual investigation into the way the technologies of photography and cinema shape human beings and change the way we look at the world. Lindsay Seers elaborates falsely personal stories punctuated by unlikely narrative devices in which photographic theory mixes with philosophical, psychological and scientific concepts. Her approach to photography is inspired mainly by metaphysical philosophy (Neo-Platonism, Renaissance alchemy and the thought of Henri Bergson) and she treats the medium as a support which generates meaning rather than as a simple document. It thus becomes more productive than descriptive. Seers’ works are all interconnected and develop simultaneously, taking us on multiple journeys. In them we find metaphysical questions and thoughts about colour and representation, her fascination with heterochromia (when a person has eyes of differing colours). The recent pieces (Monocular, 2011 and It has to be this way, 2010) are complex installations. Some, such as Nowhere less now (2012), installed at the Tin Tabernacle in London, are site-specific, made in unlikely spaces.
Veritable cabinets of curiosities, these installations are factual and theatrical structures which embody the dual essence of evidence and artefact, and refer us to the architecture of narrative plots.

BIOGRAPHY: Lindsay Seers was born in 1966 in London where she lives and works.Trained at the Slade School of Art and at Goldsmiths College (both London), Lindsay Seers has been awarded several scholarships including the Sharjah Art Foundation (2012, and won the Paul Hamly Prize in 2010 and the Derek Jarman Prize in 2009. She has had many exhibitions in Great Britain (4th Tate Triennial, 2009) and abroad, notably the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen in 2010 (It has to be this way 2), the Lofoten International Art Festival, Norway, in 2011, the TPW Gallery in Toronto (Extramission 6) in 2011, and the Smart Project Space in Amsterdam in 2007
(Swallowing Black Maria).

> Hôtel-Dieu
Festival International d’Art de Toulouse
http://toulouseartfestival.com