Harder, Better, Faster
June 11 - August 20, 2016
Galerie Trois Points is thrilled to present Harder, Better, Faster, a collective exhibition featuring works by gallery artist Olga Chagaoutdinova and guest artists Stéphanie De Couto Costa, Olivia Mc Gilchrist, Dominique Sirois and Mégane Voghell. The gallery invited two young curators, Marie-Christine Dubé and John Boyle-Singfield, to take over both exhibition spaces for its summer exhibition.
Harder, Better, Faster gathers practices that examine representation and our relation to the image – projected – to the cultural, economic, mythological, penal and social identities. The works starring in this exhibition participate in the creation of a myth that reinforces the empowerment of women’s identities. Dubé and Boyle-Singfield wondered if it was possible to address this issue without being defused by the media and authorities in place. Far from denouncing or claiming, Harder, Better, Fasterrather questions the behaviours assimilated and reproduced by gender stereotypes and double standards related to self-representation, within a hypermodern society wich condones self-subordination.
The Zone is an ongoing and extensive series of portraits of imprisoned women, started by Olga Chagaoutdinova in 2004. Through photographs taken during intimate encounters held in a women’s prison in the Russian Far East, Chagaoutdinovainvestigates the notions of personal identity and sexuality – almost annihilated under the pressure and the rules of the Russian penal system. The prisoners, who agreed to long interviews with the artist before allowing to have their picture taken, help to closely observe human existence in a panoptic and penal environment which is not so often associated to the feminine world.
The Bitch and The Blond is a ongoing series of young artist Stéphanie De Couto Costa, exploring female representation through history, folklore and fairy tale. Inspired by feminist writings and the works of authors such as Angela Carter, Jeannette Winterson and Anne Sexton, De Couto Costa reveals a subversive retelling on how Western moralizing and gender bias have codified fairy tales. By referencing the iconography of these fables, this series of etchings defies predetermined and subjective representations of female body and tends to appropriate these stories that act as official mythology of a white, heteronormative, Western society.
From many sides is an immersive video installation from Olivia Mc Gilchrist which highlights intuitive connections to the Caribbean island space, to its rich hues, strong contrasts, darkness and light. Featuring mythical figures from Jamaican culture such as the ‘Riva Mumma’, Mc Gilchrist reinvestigates several themes of her larger practice, namely the expression of emotional states surrounding cultural and gender identity. From many sides portrays different sites of memory through layers of tropical landscapes; mixing stories and myths from the complex and hybrid past of postcolonial Caribbean culture.
Mimesis Trinyty is part of the ongoing research of Dominique Sirois. This installation taken from a fictional society project is conceived as a conceptual space that serves as a field of reflection and creation within whose framework takes place in the financial world. The project started with the exhibition of the company’s reception desk where the artist has explored the search of power in the economy by making analogies with muscular training, amongst other things. In collaboration with Grégory Chatonsky, the artist constituted a generated text conflating the writings of the economist André Orléan and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. A female character recites this curious text highlighting the dimension of affect in finance.
The video installation How to Remove a Lady From it’s Flesh of Mégane Voghell examines a contaminated, nay dirty, productivity, through a succession of images, notes and aborted narrative potentials. This video features glimpses of reflections and superimposed combinations – is it a face on the image or an image on the face? – therefore refusing the viewer a linear reading or a fluid understanding of the content of the work. On an experimental scale, Voghell observes what the manipulation of images and its filtering through social networks have in terms of power and affect on human psychology, more precisely that of woman.