LIGHTNING RIDE (2017) – Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion
With Lightning Ride, it is poles of technology, organics and mysticism that collide with electricity as a connecting point. The video is produced from excerpts of “Taser Certifications”, a sort of ceremony authorizing in the United States the use of Tasers in the condition of being first tased by someone else. Filtered with the famous Photoshop’s “oil painting effect”, slowed down and accompanied by a disturbing soundtrack, the succeeding images show us bodies and faces whose deformations and positions evoke a feeling of pain as well as a Christian ecstacy. Everything unfolds as if the miracle of electricity, symbol of the rationalization of the world, revived paradoxically an aspiration to transcendence, antipodes joining each other and disappearing in profit of a new map of possibilities.
(Sarah Ihler-Meyer)
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BIO
Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion live and work in Paris. Their work has been the recipient of the Arte Laguna Prize and the Contemporary Talent Prize of the François Schneider foundation. It was included in the 5th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, the 5th ADIAF triennale and numerous group exhibitions and screenings including at Untitled Miami Beach; OCAT Shenzhen; Daegu Art Museum; Seongnam Arts Center; AramNuri Arts Center, Goyang; London Art Fair ; Carroll/Fletcher, London; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Rijeka; Loop Barcelona; Centre pour l’Image Contemporaine, Geneva; The Solo Project, Basel; Polit-Forum, Bern; Telecom Italia Future Centre, Venice; Art Brussels; Musée L, Louvain-la-Neuve; Palais de Tokyo, MAIF Social Club and Centquatre, Paris; Cité de la céramique, Sèvres; Vasarely foundation, Aix-en-Provence. Recent and upcoming solo shows include at 22,48 m², Paris; Steve Turner, Los Angeles and Villa du Parc, Annemasse.
“The meaning of value in a post-whatever era, the mass abundance of images – from amateur image production to professional images to algorithmically generated images – and the consequent shift of the artist from production to post-production – and from the creation of works to the generation of formats – are all recurring topics in the recent work of Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion. Since 2009 the French couple has been focusing on projects that, renovating the modernist language of film, make an extensive use of appropriated content from the web, which is freed from its status of meaningless, apparently valueless data floating in the information networks to be rearranged in complex, algorithmically generated, sometimes interactive narratives, or into powerful, iconic images.”
(Domenico Quaranta, AFK. Texts on Artists 2011 – 2016, 2016, Link Editions)