Inside Out, soloshow 2001.
Institut Français d’Architecture (IFA), 6 bis rue de Tournon, 75006 Paris
As part of the Home Sweet Home program, 2001.
Curator: Fiona Meadows.
Exhibited works: environmental installation “Out / Hang around here after in and out”, 600 plastified images, red and blue electric cables, fragments of mirror, 40 chairs, approx. 400 m2; installation “Inside / Hang around here after out and in”, photography (satin lambda print), 150 mirror squares (20 x 20 cm), suspension system in fishing thread including a bead abacus, suspension grid, 2 x 3 x 3 m.
Press release extract
As part of the Home Sweet Home spring program, Raphaële Bidault-Waddington is presenting two photographic installations in the hall and in the garden of the French Institute of Architecture.
The first, Out transforms the garden into a global and entangled image environment allowing the spectator to sit, slow down and contemplate without knowing exactly what to look at nor where the artwork starts and finishes, leaving him free to appropriate the space and speculate as an autonomous reading head.
Following the specific grammar of her image bank (about 12 image categories), the 600 images were captured by RBW in St Quentin en Yvelines, a new city in the distant suburb of Paris, built in the 60’s as a modernist grand ensemble where vital urban functions are clearly separate. The eco-systemic, open and poetic composition created by the artist offers a prospective counter statement to this deadly urban model, echoing both the need to reconnect the city to the natural processes and to re-envision it with its increasing flows of information.
The second installation Inside is displayed in the entrance hall and is visible from both inside and outside the institute. It epitomizes the way RBW scans territories and rebuilds poetic panoramas where the eye and the mind can get lost in an endless speculative process. The empty chair manifests both the presence and the absence of the artist. And enhancing its realness and almost magical effect, the installation is strangely massive on one side, aerial on its mirror side, and nearly disappearing from the other…
