Ismaïl Bahri - Instruments

Discussion Jean-Christophe Bailly and the artist: June 20, 7–9pm Visit with the artist and the curator: June 27, 6pm

This summer, Jeu de Paume opens its doors to Ismaïl Bahri for his first major exhibition. Born in Tunis in 1978, the artist lives and works between Paris and Tunis. He works mainly with video although he continues to make drawings, photographs and installations. Ismaïl Bahri’s work is often produced from a series of operations featuring basic elements of everyday life, with the action stemming from the interaction between them: a drop of water, for example, placed on someone’s skin and reacting to arterial pulsations; a thread being wound in; or the fibres in a sheet of paper becoming permeated with ink.

With his attentive eye, his sense of detail and his taste for the enigmatic, the artist creates micro-events while at the same time questioning the conditions for their visibility. Instruments, the exhibition at Jeu de Paume, presents a selection of his principal works along with two new works, conceived and produced for the occasion. This set of eight video works reflects the main themes running through his oeuvre; such themes as fundamentals, duration, scale, and transformation, but also visibility and invisibility, mystery and solving the mystery. The exhibition seeks to develop a movement of progressive enlargement, starting with the intimate and leading outwards to landscape, light and a certain sort of abstraction.