| Dates: | born 1949
| | Biography: | Born 1949.
Lives and works in Paris
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
1999 The Power Plant Contemporary Art
Gallery, Toronto
Arlogos Gallery, Paris
1998 Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
1997 La Campagne, Galerie Arlogos,
Nantes
1995 Les Barricades Mysterieuses II,
Cabinet
des Estampes du Musee d'Art et
d'Histoire, Geneve
1994 Every One, Centraal Museum,
Utrecht;
Gallery Arlogos, Nantes
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
1999 The Edge of Awareness, Lalit Kala
Akademi, New Delhi; Triennale di Milano,
Milan; WHO Headquarters, Geneva
(1998);
PS 1, New York (1998)
1998 La Sphere de l'Intime, Printemps de
Cahors, France
Premises, 1960s-1990s, Guggenheim
Soho, New York
1997 Trade Routes: History &
Geography, 2nd Johannesburg Biennale,
Johannesburg Art Dealers/Marchands
d'Art, Anciens Entrepots de la Seite,
Marseille
1996 Radikale Bilder, Neue Galerie, Graz
New Photography 12, Museum of
Modern Art, New York
Face a l’Histoire, Centre Georges
Pompidou, Paris
FURTHER READING
Mack, M. Surface: Contemporary
Photographic Practice, Booth Clibborn,
London
Sophie Ristelhueber: Les Barricades
Mysterieuses II (exh. cat.),
Cabinet des Estampes du Musee d'Art
et d'Histoire, Geneve 1995
Sans, J. Sophie Ristelhueber: Une
Oeuvre de Terrain,
FRAC Basse-Normandie, Caen
Trade Routes: History & Geography, 2nd
Johannesburg Biennale (exh. cat.)
Johannesburg 1997 | | | Source: | "Trace, 1st Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art", Festival catalogue | | | Date of source: | 1999 |
|
| | Description: | Images as crisis points*
Sophie Ristelhueber is concerned, first
and foremost, with the ambivalence of
things, the porous borderline between
reality and fiction, the dialectical
relationship between work and image,
and the variable hierarchy of figures of
speech, be it iconographic or linguistic
speech: the said and the unsaid, more
for less, part for whole.
One of the artist's latest pieces, La
Campagne (The Countryside/The
Campaign) produced in 1991-97,
achieves a peak-like form in which the
vectors of her particular arrangement all
converge. It is made up of three groups
of five to ten large photos stacked
higgledy-piggledy against the wall at
ground level. These black-and-white and
colour photos were printed digitally, so
as to achieve a simple poster-like
rendering, and affixed to thin board right
to the edges, in such a way as to
convey the notion of temporariness and
removability.
Vertical in format, some of them actually
curve. At first glance, the overall
impression is that of a stroll in rural
surroundings, where the atmosphere is
calm, even bucolic. The photos overlap,
so they are not all totally visible but we
glimpse here, a cart horse, there, a pine
forest, and bathers in a waterfall nearby
a picturesque village, and over there, a
meadow dotted with dandelion flowers or
alternatively a quite vertical view of a
hillside planted with small trees, and,
last of all, a country lane apparently cut
off by a flooding river.
However, in no time at all, the
impression of tranquillity gives way to a
vague sense of oppressiveness. The
perceptual interpretation, which wavers
imperceptibly from the start, becomes
blurred, slight signs of destruction
appear, and the frail interpreta¬tive
scaffolding collapses. We then see that
the horse in the foreground is trotting in
front of a deserted building whose
windows have all been shattered, we
realise that the dwellings nestling in the
green field near the bathers, as well as
the other dwellings in the other photos,
are all destroyed and empty.
Even without knowing that the village
with the bathers is Mostar, that the
flooded lane was due to the excavations
following the discovery of a mass grave,
that the dandelions are growing right
beside a brand new cemetery, that the
hill is the one the survivors of the
Srebrenica massacre fled across, and
that, in a word, the place is in ravaged
Bosnia.
* This text is an excerpt from: Ann
Hindry, Sophie Ristelhueber (Paris:
Editions Hazan, 1998) 63-9.
| | Description Source: | "Trace, 1st Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art", Festival catalogue | | Description Source Date: | 1999 | | Type: | person |
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