Exit | duo exhibition with Yoanna Blikman · 2019
Curated by Dan Robert Lahiani | d+y
“Exit” is a series of photographs documenting moments before, during and after the releasing of people from a mean of transport.
Yoanna Blikman is a “movement artist”. She uses her body as her first tool of expression. In this particular moment, she carries an analogue camera and document the disagreeable moment of exiting a confined space. Bodies are being contained, carried, retained, restrained, and soon to be released from inside a ferry-boat. The documentary aspect is pure, without meticulousness or any mark of direction. Yoanna Blikman sends the viewer into transports of emotions. Through the use of a camera, she protects her body and her perception from the intense brevity of the inevitable Exit she will need to go through.
The series conveys femininity, warmth, contentment and intimacy through its textures but also a thermal shock producing an unpleasant, even unbearable insecurity: the one of the Exit. The release from hibernation eventually leads to an anticipated rebirth of the beings, through a massive exit gate.
Coming from a Polish and Romanian Jewish descent, Yoanna expresses herself through film photography, whose trace and transformation seems to constitute an absolute necessity.
On one of the photographs, the seats are empty, abandoned by their passengers, who left a few seconds before the shot. Ghosts. On another photograph: a man, filtered by drops of water on the lense. Blikman seems to have dragged herself out from the human mass and got positioned behind the man who choreographs the Exit. Eventually, she puts an end to this photographical experience, by shooting the massive container closing its gate. If the series resembles an abstract fotonovela, it constitutes the testimony, the flesh, the outcome of Blikman Exit’s armour.
For this artist’s wall, I add to her series, two video works which dialogue with the photographs. One of the works is a one-shot and video documentation of the Exit in the same environnement. I film the standing silhouettes as if they were watching moving images on a screen. It is not clear whether those are simply people standing, immigrants, tourists, and from which social class they belong to. Once the silhouettes disappeared toward the outside, I document my own exiting, and enter through the apparent “screen” of day light.
The second video work portrays my father sleeping in his house. As he sleeps, I take my camera and escape the house to a higher altitude. This video ballade establishes trajectories between a confined inside and an uncertain, turbulent outside.
Text by Dan Robert Lahiani - April 2019
