Confluents Névralgiques - Elena Salah
Exhibition from January 17 to February 24, 2023
Exhibition opening Monday January 16 at 6pm
Cultural space - Faculty of Education - Montpellier site
Currently in residence at Montpellier University's Faculty of Education, Elena Salah is proposing a two-part residency: one outside the walls in French Guiana and the other in the University's Cultural Space. The artist, in line with the program of La Résidence(s) Croisée(s), set up with the MoCo and the Florian nursery school, is integrating a research project initiated last year in French Guiana and supported by the Drac Occitanie's Aide Individuelle à la Création and by the Daac Guyane.
During this "Hors les Murs" workshop, the artist will use her website to showcase her In Situ research, a time when she is out in the field rather than in the studio, and to share her surroundings. Her artistic work takes her to different territories to question history through landscape memory. On her return, she will use the Espace Culturel de la Faculté to produce pieces linked to the research she carried out in French Guiana. Her work will be on view at the exhibition in January 2023.
This artist residency is the first phase of the Résidence(s) Croisée(s) program, implemented in partnership with Mo.Co., Florian nursery school, Montpellier and DRAC Occitanie, Montpellier.
"Éléna Salah unfolds her gaze on the ruins of the world. By questioning her origins and destiny, she works on the processes of remembering, their motivations and the need for transmission. What strikes you first is the contrast between the lightness and economy of her forms and the gravity of her subjects. She clearly places the traumatic event, the tragedy, at the root of our experience, and the architecture, the monument, the place, as proof and symbol of the catastrophe. Her journeys to Sicily, Japan and Algeria are quests and the concrete spaces of her action, whose poetic status promises the transformation of chaos into subtle, sensitive, modest art. Landscapes are no longer a picturesque spectacle, but a reality from which meaning can emerge. She prefers empty, unproductive landscapes that speak of the place of their disappearance and return the survivors to the anguish of a responsibility." Céline Mélissent - Frac Occitanie Montpellier, 2020
Biography
Éléna Salah, born in 1986 in Montreuil, a Paris suburb, lives and works in Sète. It was in Nantes, where she graduated from the Beaux-Arts, that she began to question sculpture through the photographic image. She then went on to study ceramics at the Haute École d'Art et de Design de Genève (HEAD) in Switzerland. She has exhibited at l'Assaut de la Menuiserie in Saint-Étienne, France, in conjunction with the 2017 Lyon Biennial, and in 2020 at three sites in Villeneuve-lez-Avignon, France, with the Frac Occitanie Montpellier for a solo show. She will carry out a residency in Guyana (Aide à la Création de la DRAC) in 2021/2022.
More about the artist : elenasalah
