The Fundación Luis Seoane, with the collaboration of Paris’s Jeu de Paume, is holding for the first time in Spain a solo exhibition on photographer and filmmaker Valérie Jouve (Saint-Étienne, 1964). Valérie Jouve. Corps en résistance is a compilation of over thirty photographs, several films and a site-especific installation called Blues. In them, the artist explores one’s relationship with our environment, between our bodies and urban spaces, as a reflection on the problems that are inherent to the evolution of contemporary societies from a political and poetic standpoint. Valérie Jouve constructs her pieces through a series of mise-en-scènes that put her work in a place between fiction and documentary, questioning the ability of the images to show a reality that everyone of us experiences.
Jouve’s photographic compositions make up a tense, wilfully ambiguous space, emphasised by the “Untitled” with which she names her images. The pictures constitute an open set that the artist is completing over time, each of them having some generic subtitle written in brackets: Les Personnages (The Characters), Les Façades (The Façades), Les Passants (The Passersby), La Rue (The Street), Les Situations (The Situations), Les Arbres (The Trees)… The pieces on view at the Fundación Luis Seoane were created by the artist between the 1980s and now. The exhibition has managed to create a tension between the static images and some film pieces that question the city and its margins, from Grand Littoral and Traversée to her latest piece, Blues.
