Capucine Vever navigates troubled waters
About the exhibition “Where the world overflows”, on view at La Graineterie, contemporary art center in Houilles, in Yvelines, until May 25, 2024.
We will never say to what extent artists are whistleblowers. I was struck by the images of the short film dedicated in 2022 to Capucine Vever on Arte, on the occasion of her video, sound and immersive installation project entitled Dunking Island, in the excellent Atelier A series imagined with the ADAGP. A series still visible on Arte.tv in fact, which I therefore recommend to you in passing, since it offers in less than ten minutes the opportunity to enter the studio of a different artist in each episode, and therefore each time in a unique artistic universe. It feels like we're pushing open doors at random, and I assure you that the encounters are wonderful! You will thus come across contemporary artists that you surely already know, such as Sylvie Fanchon, Françoise Petrovitch, Edi Dubien, Lee Ufan, Clément Cogitore or Eva Jospin, but also some whose work you may not have yet had the chance to meet. works such as Pierre Labat, Emmanuel Régent, Cécile Beau, Jakob Gautel, Camille Llobet, Yan Kopp, Thomas Lévy-Lasme, Aurélie Pétrel, Joanna Vasconcelos, Feda Wardak, Shayna Klee… Impossible to name here all the players in the property market contemporary art who took part in the game: don't deprive yourself, it's addictive and very inspiring!
This is how I discovered Capucine Vever, a French visual artist born in 1986 in Paris, living and working in Bobigny, explaining that she had to train in scuba diving to carry out the Dunking Island artistic project. leading him to explore the underwater depths around the island of Gorée, in Senegal, with his camera at arm's length. I have never forgotten the fish and floating waste in these images filmed in immersion, shown on six projection screens, also floating, placing the viewer in an immersive stroll as well. I'll pass on the sound and text work to you. In short, Capucine Vever fascinated me with its ability to immerse us in a specific territory, to physically and sensorially experience ecosystems loaded with memory (the island of Gorée is a nerve center of the slave trade).
His works of art for sale are purely and simply cultural representations of environments transformed and weakened by human actions. Whether they relate to drawing, sculpture, photography or sound and visual installation. In fact, I don't know Capucine Vever's rating on the contemporary art market, but I know that she develops contextual work interested in the notion of the invisible, the unattainable and the imperceptible. Whether geographical, social and/or cultural, the territory is central to his artistic approach. His practice attempts to engage in a poetic relationship by exploiting the narrative potential of each space. His works proceed through collages, analogies, permanent friction between reality and fiction, scientific research and narration, cartography and legend, displacement and immobility. It's fascinating. And don’t let anyone tell me that contemporary art is too conceptual, that we don’t understand anything about it, etc.! If Capucine Vever's works can disturb and annoy, it is only because they confront us with reality. Obviously, “Capucine Vever’s creations also question politics,” notes Jeanne Mathas in the article she devotes to the contemporary artist this month in Artpress.
Capucine Vever's work has already been presented in numerous art galleries and institutions: at the Museo d'Història de Catalunya (Barcelona), at the IMAGE/IMATGE art center (Orthez), at the Frac Grand Large (Dunkirk), at the Château d'Oiron (Deux-Sèvres), at the Nam June Paik Art Center (Seoul), at the La Halle des Bouchers Art Center (Vienna), at the Belleville Biennale (Paris), at the Passerelle Contemporary Art Center (Brest), at Instants Chavirés (Montreuil). And his work is frequently developed during creative residencies such as at Kër Thiossane (Dakar, 2021), Solarium Tournant (Aix-les-bains, 2020), at Iconoclasses (Yvetot, 2020), at Evry-Courcouronnes (2019), at the Ouessant semaphore (Finis Terrae, 2018), at Eremi Arte (Italy, 2017), at the Maison des Arts de Malakoff (2014).
In 2021, she was the winner of the Art and Environment Prize from the Art of Change association and the tailor-made Plus + residency from the Institut Français. The same year, she won the 2021 Michel Nessim Boukris Prize from the Fondation des Artistes for the famous Dunking Island project. In 2019, she won first prize at the OVNI video festival with her film La Relève. His works are part of the collection of the Departmental Council of Seine St Denis, the FRAC Grand Large and several private collections. In 2022, she is nominated for the COAL prize.
And since March 30 of this year 2024, she has been showing a fascinating inventory of her artistic research in the exhibition “Where the world overflows”, on view until May 25, at La Graineterie, a cultural and art center in the town of Houilles, in Yvelines (7 km from Porte Maillot for Parisians). The opportunity to physically discover the work of Capucine Vever which I did not yet know.
“Where the world overflows takes a look at more than ten years of creation by Capucine Vever and her approach to landscape,” writes Julie Sicault-Maillé, curator of the exhibition. “Beyond a projection space, the artist approaches it as a political space, with environmental and social issues coming to the surface. From abandoned landscapes to the waste of human activity or to coveted, monopolized, constrained, even damaged spaces, his works delicately highlight them by playing with poetry. Capucine Vever works landscapes according to a score of observation and suggestion. His creations draw their origins from the specificities of a territory, the human activities that take place there and the representations to which it is the subject. She thus anchors her approach in a deep reality by operating from observations, scientific studies, maps, experiments, encounters and then disturbs it to create a story sliding towards fiction, a poetic work, a sensitive representation of societal issues. Between visible and invisible, from gigantism to the tiny, the artist absorbs and manipulates what is offered to us to reveal what is hidden, and leave room for the imagination. His new creation Les troubles de la Garonne, 2024, presented under the immense glass roof of the Graineterie, is commensurate with this entire process of research and artistic experimentation. »
Jeanne Mathas' article in Artpress will, I think, make you want to get closer to the works of art by Capucine Vever. “Behind the window of La Graineterie, Capucine Vever places us at the mouth of the Rio Piscinas-Irvi, in the southwest of Sardinia. The colors of the photographic diptych Fiume Rosso (2019) recall in their mysterious shimmer the stubborn residue of an old mining operation. To these toxic and artificial paradises, the artist adds a critical gesture, a simple sentence, a question, inscribed in the sand. “The minera breathed ancora? » (Is the mine still breathing?) She questions the landscape and the sign. » As for his very latest terracotta sculptures, they stand there, monumental, entitled the Troubles of the Garonne...
As Jeanne Mathas, art critic, exhibition curator and independent researcher, writes so well, “Where the world overflows demolishes the clichés of landscape painting, unfolds on different scales, probes our relationships with the environment , to the territory with a requirement and a generosity where the panoramas are no longer admired, but experienced. Let's live!
Article written by Valibri in Roulotte