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September 9, 2020 – Review
Claire Chevrier and Ali Kazma’s “Extracted Foreign Bodies”
Rahma Khazam
In his 1964 essay “Rhetoric of the Image,” Roland Barthes made a key distinction between photography and film: while film produces an awareness of the “being-there” of a thing, photography generates a consciousness of its “having-been-there.” Photography is thus “the return of the dead,” a “flat death,” as Barthes wrote in Camera Lucida (1980), that cannot be brought back to life. Or, as Christian Metz wrote in 1985, expanding on Barthes’s distinction, film makes the dead appear alive, but photography, because of its stillness, “maintains the memory of the dead as being dead.” Some forty years on, this two-person exhibition offers a different perspective on the image: the encounter it stages between Turkish video artist Ali Kazma and French photographer Claire Chevrier challenges the association of film with life and photography with death, turning the conventional dichotomy on its head.
Spread across the labyrinthine spaces of Les Moulins de Paillard—an arts center in a former eighteenth-century paper mill, with a program ranging from Gordon Matta-Clark to contemporary music and dance—“Extracted Foreign Bodies” explores the liminal spaces between the two genres in a series of revealing confrontations. In the first room, Kazma’s single-channel video Safe, Resistance (2015) portrays the Global …