Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza: backwards

Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza: à rebours (backwards) à rebours presents work by Ecuadorian artist Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza whose oeuvre is built around notions of memory and forgetting, apparition and disappearance. It is the fruit of a troubling manipulation of time and attempts to invert its progression. The exhibition the Frac devotes to her echoes work she designed in the framework of a public commission for Chalezeule, a town situated near Besançon.

à rebours notably assembles a piece acquired by the Frac (preface to a cartography of an imagined country, 2010) and an impressive installation the artist began in 2009 called untitled (extras), as well as the video countdown (2005–13).

untitled (extras) is composed of newspaper whereupon the artist has rubbed out shapes—those of extras in the media scene who are, by nature, neither subject or object. Only a ghost-like shape remains on the page, their auras. Nearby, numbered flasks with a clinical esthetic contain residue or precipitation of each of her erasures, seemingly the very essence of these beings lacking consistency. They build a community, a moving crowd of anonyms. Here the artist waxes paradoxical, giving the extras an identity, be it digital: by erasing images of these humans "on the fringe" our eye barely glances, Estefanía hollowly resupplies them with body. By making them disappear she reveals them.