27th Festival 2015 Exhibition

LESBIAN VISIBILITY: To live happily, live visible!

Despite the newly adopted "marriage for all" law, lesbians are still not visible enough in the public domain. Indeed more than half of lesbians consider their immediate surrounding before holding hands or kissing their partner and for 63% of them this attitude is explained by fear of hostile reactions.(National survey on lesbian visibility and lesbophobia, SOS Homophobia, March 2015).

Adam.M, Christelle Vincent-Poupin, (photographers) and Sophie André, (painter), explore this issue from different angles.




Adam.M


Adam.M's work highlights human realities which, although made invisible within the stereotyped masses, exist nonetheless and play a part in the society of today and tomorrow: those of a variety of women, attached to their freedom, overcoming restrictions, engaging in intrinsic self-exploration and fulfilling themselves as they choose to do so.

Her film Thérèse(s) et Simone(s) received the Cineffable Audience Award in 2014

Lesbian 107 Flozif # 2015 # Photography
Lesbian 107 Flozif # 2015 # Photography
Lesbian 107 # The 107 portraits that make up this project are the result of various encounter, some distant, some recent and some inspired by the project. Some of the participants are friends, comrades in arms, others are sources of inspiration, intellectual guides, indispensable. To understand and question their place as a lesbian in society, she asked each of them these three questions: What does it mean to you to be visible as a lesbian? What were or are the times when you feel or felt the most visible as a lesbian? What is or are your identity(ies)? How do you define yourself? She did not think that three simple questions would bring with them so many nuances, experiences, sociological and political indicators. Lesbian voices must be heard equally with others. They are here, they say so here and elsewhere, look at them, listen to them, now and again and again.

ECCE HOMO, Self-portraits of transgender practices # reflects Adam.M's constant questioning of gender and its associated representations. Clothes are very powerful gender identity markers of our society, widely used to strengthen "norms", stereotypes and their oppressive potential. Adam.M proposes to go beyond them and to use nothing more than what one is. ECCE HOMO (Behold Man), a provocative and mystical invocation. A naked body, a biological body on which are inscribed unexpected gender markers, reversed and contradictory. Postures, movements, hair, muscles, flesh compose an ensemble that reveals transgender practices while denaturalizing what makes woman and what makes man. Both object and subject of the study, the body is a trans performance that takes the liberty to (re)define itself at every moment.


Stolen moments # Photography
Stolen moments # Photography

Christelle Vincent-Poupin


After studying Art History at the Sorbonne and Audio-visual at ENS Louis Lumière, Christelle Vincent-Poupin has turned to audio-visual fiction and photography. She uses a quasi-documentary approach to represent and produce models absent or barely visible in the collective space. Her work reveals her intimacy and that of couples in public places. She has exhibited in places like the Violette and Co bookshop and at the Lesbian and Feminist International Paris Film Festival Cineffable, first exhibiting in 2006.


Stolen moments. Couples, from invisibility to intimacy # is a series of photos taken at various Pride Marches; moments defined in time and place where the body, the lesbian couple may temporarily, freely invest the public space. The quasi-documentary approach, often photographed from behind to respect the moment, serves to accentuate the development and mystery of the viewer's own narrative and tends to reveal a raw intense intimacy, not staged for the camera or voyeuristic gaze of the viewer. Body close-ups, fleeting brushes, gestures, skin, kisses reveal the diversity of couples in the universality of proximity, the sensuality of being in love. The small format deliberately invites the viewer to enter into the intimacy of these moments, these bodies; the black and white enables them to pull out of a too restrictive spatial and temporal predicament. This series representing the couple, the gesture, the moment, exposes snippets of our loves, our intimacy and our lives. It also illustrates the almost daily struggle against invisibility that is the lot of the majority of lesbians. She tells our stories, our history so often stifled or rewritten through the filter of the main stream. Her work strives to be the witness, the image messenger who resembles us in order to unveil the depths of intimacy, the very fabric of our feelings...


The Amazons # Painting
The Amazons # Painting

Sophie André


Originally a dancer, Sophie André takes classes at the School of Applied Arts Duperré and ENSBA. Since 2001 she has been exhibiting her half-figurative-half-abstract paintings in Paris and the provinces, in France and abroad, in places like Les Scandaleuses (now 3W), the Yvon Lambert Gallery with the AIDS collective or l'Espace Art Gallery in Brussels.


Sophie André questions the visibility of women in society and in art. Even if images of certain types of women are represented in the artistic world, the independent, free and powerful woman is under-represented. Similarly, women artists are not very visible. Sophie André also interprets mythology with her series dedicated to the Amazons and The Daughters of Danaus. She works freely and intuitively using bright colours like red which is a multi-symbolic colour, ranging from violence to passion and expressing purged suffering. Black and white are used to underline and trace movement. Inspired by dance, she plays on the rhythm of colours, lines and materials, reflecting a pictorial choreography.

The Daughters of Danaus # Painting
The Daughters of Danaus # Painting

The Amazons # This series is inspired by the myth of the Amazons, strong, independent, women warriors of a matriarchal society. Sophie André transposes it to today by paying tribute to the Femen who fight patriarchal society with the nakedness of their bodies.

The Daughters of Danaus # This series is inspired by the fate of the Danaids, female combatants condemned to fill a bottomless barrel. She tells the myth in her own way where the Danaids are protrayed in the pleasure and sensuality of a shared moment and not as the suffering water carriers.




Partners 2015

360° Art'Pi ! Centre LGBT Paris ÎdF Jeanne Magazine

City of Montreuil City of Paris Univers L Librairie Violette and Co




Archives 2015

Accessibility



Deaf and Hard of Hearing Audience Deaf and Hard of Hearing Audience  Deaf and Hard of Hearing Audience

People with Limited Mobility  People with Limited Mobility

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