Beverly Buchanan: Impermanences, with Hélène Yamba-Guimbi

Beverly Buchanan: Impermanences, with Hélène Yamba-Guimbi

49 Nord 6 Est presents the first exhibition of Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015, United States) in France, in dialogue with the practice of Hélène Yamba-Guimbi (1995, France). Resonating with the sense of instability that pervades much of our present, the exhibition introduces an artist who strikingly evokes the impermanence of life itself. 

Interested in infrastructure as a repository of memory, Beverly Buchanan has been a keen observer of architecture and the stories it tells. Sculptures and large oil pastel drawings represent shacks, dwellings typical of precarious populations living on the edges of rural cities in the American South, a specificity of the regional architecture of the artist’s lived environment—which would continue to serve as a vital source of inspiration in her artistic practice. Begun in the 1980s, these sculptures also invite us to consider the object as an extension of a person’s body. Over time, Beverly Buchanan came to view these shacks as a culture in their own right, which describes both the inhabitants that built them and marks a neglected social reality. 

Beverly Buchanan’s work notably explores the history of slavery through monuments hovering—like untold stories—at visibility’s edge. Relying on Buchanan’s writings and testimonies, the artist Hélène Yamba-Guimbi offers an ensemble of embodied sculptures that breathe life into the space. Resonating with respiratory problems that followed Buchanan for most of her life, audio speakers project uneven breathing into the rooms. These breaths take on a political dimension: breathing is never a neutral or self-evident capacity—it is inscribed in a condition situated in the social and the physical, revealing regimes of inequality in labor, in exhaustion, and in privilege. 

The exhibition is developed in collaboration with Haus am Waldsee, Berlin and Spike Island, Bristol.

Degrés Est: Anaïs Marion

Anaïs Marion is been invited to occupy the Degrés Est space, dedicated to artists linked to the Grand Est region, following a proposal by Fanny Gonella, director of Frac Lorraine.

The artist has developed an investigative practice in which observation, collection and displacement become ways of writing history differently. Her works, which combine photography, writing and protocol, blend archaeological methodology and the poetry of inventories to question collective memory, the circulation of knowledge and the effects of the uprooting of heritage.