This autumn, Bally Foundation presents the first solo exhibition by Saudi-American artist Sarah Brahim: Sometimes we are eternal.
The exhibition brings together ten new installations, works produced specifically for the occasion, in an ensemble where all the pieces, while independent, trace the contours of an intimate landscape. What marks does memory leave on materials? How can we discern between memory and imagination? Spread over two floors, in a space reminiscent of a dance studio, video and sound installations, photographs and sculptures offer a score in which gestures and sounds question our presence in the world, our very physicality.
Sometimes we are eternal borrows its title from the words of Alain Badiou to describe the feeling of eternity that can sometimes inhabit us, a suture between the finite and the infinite that the artist lets us perceive in her works, the body itself becoming the trace of immanence within human finitude. The artist’s research is also inspired by artists and thinkers such as Lawrence and Anna Halprin, Pauline Oliveros or Aldo Rossi, and philosophers and practitioners as Moshe Feldenkrais and Philippe Descola, who have conceived of art as a heightened experience of life, a search for the unification of body, consciousness and environment.
While the foundation’s inaugural exhibition Un lac inconnu, featuring 22 international artists, offered a privileged dialogue with the landscape surrounding the Villa Heleneum, Sarah Brahim’s proposal is built around an intimate landscape: a resilient, luminous and poetic mental space, a kind of temporal distancing that separates the exhibition from an event that changed the artist’s life – the loss of a loved person – marking both a point of arrival and, above all, a new beginning.
Trained as a dancer, Sarah Brahim’s works take the form of a pas de deux, an intimate conversation between the body and its alterity, where the form of the exchange merges with its outline: a dialogue of interiority that aims to move from the flesh and gravity of the physical body to the «intrabody», to the imperceptible, the spiritual, the distant. Suspended bodies, breathing, marks, rhythms and rituals mingle together in multiple installations that extend movement.
Press release from Bally Foundation
