Meeting Point #3: Dork Zabunyan & Marie Voignier
“Marie Voignier: The Suspended Gaze”
For a number of years, Marie Voignier has been making films that explore our perception of past and contemporary history, while discreetly analyzing – without preaching to viewers – the ways in which visual and sound stereotypes come to envelop this. In her work, historical strata encounter layers of clichés that ultimately inhibit us from grasping the former’s complexity, the often-tormented link between these strata and our present day. It is with this in mind that the analysis of a touristic phenomenon collides with colonial remanences that continue to persist today. Voignier travels a great deal, on all continents (Europe in Hinterland, Africa in L’hypothèse du Mokélé-Mbembé, Asia in Tourisme international, and more), showing us countries that are un- or under-depicted in images, such as North Korea: here, the artist simultaneously deconstructs the propagandistic discourses of the Pyongyang regime, and our own perceptions, which hardly allow us to break with a hackneyed view of the North Korean people. Travels, the deconstruction of stereotypes, the examination of the circulation of images shaping our perception of a world that is itself in the making – all of these represent points of passage between Voignier’s work and that of Susan Meiselas, alongside the clear differences. These points set the tempo of this Meeting Point, recorded during the exhibition Susan Meiselas, Mediations. Here is a way to extend these Mediations or to preserve them dynamically in memory, for other travels, other wanderings through the disgruntled world of images and sounds that surround and even engulf us.
Dork Zabunyan
Translation: Sara Heft