Delphine Balley - Figures de cire (Wax figures)

Delphine Balley - Figures de cire (Wax figures) 15 September 2021 - 2 January 2022

Delphine Balley has spent more than twenty years developing her expertise in photography and video. The exhibition Figures de cire [Wax Figures] is conceived as a journey into time and the vernacular. It is a narrative ensemble consisting of three screenings, Le Pays d'en haut [The Land Above], Charivari [Hullabaloo] and Le Temps de l'oiseau [The Time of the Bird], as well as a series of photographic prints and a sculpture. By adopting the hermetic atmosphere of family portraits and the tradition of genre painting, Delphine Balley creates a portrait of universal human stiffness, in keeping with the exposure time needed for a view camera. She establishes relationships between vibrancy and fixity, formlessness and stability, truth and falsehood. Figures de cire [Wax Figures] probes the dysfunctional nature of rites and social representations and invites visitors to take their place in the procession, in a fictitious symbolic architecture and an incomplete narrative, in which marriage and funeral ceremonies merge. Delphine Balley tells a story of appearance and disappearance, the cycle of a life whose motifs and relics survive the passage of time.

Curator: Agnès Violeau