Reliquaries - Solo Exhibition at Dompierre-Sur-Besbre
Exposition from 10 November to 15 December 2018
La Résidence Municipal Art Center | Place des 3 platanes, 03290 Dompierre-sur-Besbre
Cold, eternal, sacred and macabre, the reliquary is a receptacle of a fragment of a mortal body, contained in a space of immortality. It illustrates a perfect separation of the dead from the living, which has been at the center of humanity's obsession of the "hereafter".
Departing from the questioning of "after-life", the artist guides us towards a reflection on the "pre-birth". The reliquary as an immortalized container is thus contrasted with the pregnant woman's uterus, which is also a container of a life form that will soon enter the living world.
These two receptacles, one cold and immobile, the other organic et corporal, both represent the frontier between our world and an unknown domain. Can we suppose that this mysterious enclosure, which englobes at once the prenatal and the after-death, stands for one coherent temporal continuum? Shall we change our lineal, unidirectional conception of time, and begin to envisage it in undulating, curved, and spiral forms?
This solo exhibition of Sunny J interrogates myriad rituals, elements and beliefs associated with our notion of death, and naturally, with our perception of birth. With her in-situ installation, Cemetery, the artist launches a count-down of life towards a visible death, day by day increasingly yellowed and withered in front of the spectators. From the minuscule soil dusts to the colossal infinity of the cosmos, the interaction installation, Constellations, invite visitors to a refuge inside intimate enclosures, which display uncountable stars in their interiors. The idea that the body is only a temporary recipient of the soul guides us across the exhibition, which is inevitably tainted with the artist's oriental origin and particularly marked by visual representations of women - carriers of lives - throughout Chinese history. From the blossoming of textile work in the Every Step A Lotus, to the malediction of the voodoo practice in Target, Sunny J leads us into a strange universe, woven together with obscure rituals of her native culture.
