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Hubert Czerepok: devil's island, at La Criée - Centre d'Art Contemporain Rennes.
Hubert Czerepok's solo exhibition, Devil's Island, opened May 22, 2009 at La Criée. 22.05.2009 - 26.07.2009
At the core of Czerepok`s oeuvre are the connections between fiction, topicality and historical events. It is not the facts themselves that interest the artist, but rather the way they begin with shifts, mutations, and unimaginable formal and semantic transformations.For Devil’s Island (2009), the video installation on show at La Criée, the artist visited the rocky islet off the coast of Kourou in French Guiana, famed for the penal colony to which many French political prisoners – including Alfred Dreyfus – were condemned. The images he brought back are projected onto a hexagonal sculpture referencing another form of disciplinary power: the Panopticon. Part of a circular prison building, the Panopticon allows full-time surveillance of prisoners without their knowing if they are being watched or not, the result being a sense of invisible omniscience.The exhibition also includes a series of drawings, Seances, which brings together media images relating to some tragic current event, spiritualist séances or sexual scenes. The initial Seances series retained only a minimal trace of the originals, while the images made for the Rennes exhibition combine areas of flat black with line drawing. Here Czerepok pays tribute to Goya’s Disasters of War engravings and their demonstration of all the atrocious cruelty mankind is capable of. In this new look at glamorised, mass-produced media violence, the artist forces the image back into its genuinely traumatising, critical role.The Devil’s Island exhibition comprises a highly diverse selection of works that lead us to reflect on different forms of power, the way they are depicted and the impact of this depiction on our lives.
At the core of Czerepok`s oeuvre are the connections between fiction, topicality and historical events. It is not the facts themselves that interest the artist, but rather the way they begin with shifts, mutations, and unimaginable formal and semantic transformations.For Devil’s Island (2009), the video installation on show at La Criée, the artist visited the rocky islet off the coast of Kourou in French Guiana, famed for the penal colony to which many French political prisoners – including Alfred Dreyfus – were condemned. The images he brought back are projected onto a hexagonal sculpture referencing another form of disciplinary power: the Panopticon. Part of a circular prison building, the Panopticon allows full-time surveillance of prisoners without their knowing if they are being watched or not, the result being a sense of invisible omniscience.The exhibition also includes a series of drawings, Seances, which brings together media images relating to some tragic current event, spiritualist séances or sexual scenes. The initial Seances series retained only a minimal trace of the originals, while the images made for the Rennes exhibition combine areas of flat black with line drawing. Here Czerepok pays tribute to Goya’s Disasters of War engravings and their demonstration of all the atrocious cruelty mankind is capable of. In this new look at glamorised, mass-produced media violence, the artist forces the image back into its genuinely traumatising, critical role.The Devil’s Island exhibition comprises a highly diverse selection of works that lead us to reflect on different forms of power, the way they are depicted and the impact of this depiction on our lives.
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