Elevage d’absences - Fanny Testas

Fanny Testas presents Elevage d’absences with the artists Gwenola Wagon, Philippe Braquenier and Marie Quéau.

Taking its cue from Élevage de poussière (Dust Breeding), a photograph taken by Man Ray in 1920 of Marcel Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre (The Large Glass), Fanny Testas’s proposal, Élevage d’absences, explores what images can still teach us when their ability to convey meaning wavers. To this end, the curator invites Gwenola Wagon, with her film Chroniques du soleil noir, in which the image reveals a presence constructed from what is no longer there: a vanished sun; and Philippe Braquenier, who draws on the visual codes of conspiracy theories to show that images are never valued for their appearance alone, but for the narratives that accompany them. Marie Quéau, for her part, photographs landscapes straddling the boundary between documentary and fiction, where time seems suspended, like the remnants of a world following a catastrophe that remains perpetually off-screen. These works explore images in which origin, context or certainty are lacking. Absence, however, is not viewed as a deficiency, but as a space open to interpretation, where narratives, beliefs and imaginations take shape. The artists demonstrate that images never convey truth on their own: their meaning depends on the narratives that accompany them and the perspectives that imbue them with meaning. The exhibition design, entrusted to the duo Shift Entity, extends this reflection by creating not so much a narrative path as an environment for the images. The exhibition thus invites visitors to embrace uncertainty and to ‘stay with the trouble’, rather than seeking to definitively separate truth from falsehood.