Geography Biography (Mime Marceau)

Geography Biography (Mime Marceau) combines an excerpt from Mime Marceau’s film Bip at a Society Party, reproduced in a circle, with a detail from a black-and-white photograph of an eye in the background. This limited edition is an offset (manual) print produced by Niels Borch Jensen’s studio in Copenhagen as part of a collaboration between Éditions Dilecta and the Pinault Collection, and to mark the artist’s participation in the group exhibition Avant l’orage at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris (May - September 2023).

The 35 mm film Geography Biography, created to accompany the Avant l’orage season at the Bourse de Commerce, is projected onto the walls of a circular pavilion built for the occasion in the museum’s rotunda, beneath the vast painted panorama depicting commercial trade in the colonial era. This new piece, a succession of rectangular diptychs rotating slowly around the visitor in the half-light, offers a completely different type of geography, more intimate — almost autobiographical. Within these shifting «tableaux», fragments of filmed images confined to shapes of various sizes — circles, squares, etc. — are embedded in old, new and more contemporary forms — are embedded in old postcards gleaned by the artist over time. Shots of ancient sculptures, cloud-spattered skies and rare flowers in close-up are then combined with outtakes of films from the artist’s early days, in which are featured multiple individuals and multiple panoramas captured in different parts of the world on her excursions — from Greece to Sierra Leone or California. Due to its hybrid nature, Geography Biography reinterprets the notion of landscape through the prism of memory and the subjectivity of a gaze, as the recomposed landscapes bring to life distant and dreamed temporalities, fragments of the artist’s life.