Edith Marie Pasquier, Enargeia, Västerbottens Museum Umeå, 17 November 2024 – 13 April 2025
The exhibition is a collaboration between Edith Marie Pasquier, Robin Durand architect and Tryggve Lundberg, sculptor, to create the exhibition Enargeia at the Västerbottens Museum, supported by a Small Visionary Project.
Enargeia (or bright unbearable reality) was the phrase that the ancients used to describe the aura of the classical work of war – the Iliad. It refers to the Iliad’s vocative power, to when the gods came down to earth from heaven, as they were, in their truest expression in beauty or in terror. The research and artistic project explore how humans and other living beings are affected and interconnected in the experience of sudden grief and is situated within the existing discourses of grief, politics and multi-species thinking within the contemporary arts. It unravels the known and existing discourse / histories of image making to excavate and propose alternative frames rooted in the poetics and politics of the present condition.
Working with the tools of chemical analogue photography and the notion of the ‘live’ encounter in contemporary art practice, Edith Marie Pasquier’s work uses early cinematic techniques, photographic process, sculptural assemblages, and sonic propositions to propose ‘live’ encounters that are activated by others both individually and collectively. The project questions the presence of the dead in the life of the living and open how grief resides within, around and through images.
The architectural models for the exhibition were shown at UmArts as part of the Hurricanes and Scaffolding Symposium 4-6 December 2024. Architect Robin Durand has created circular like structures which amplify the relationship between still and moving images, sculpture and sound and enables the visitors to follow their own paths through the artworks.
The exhibition includes a series of performances, readings and events. Follow the Västerbottens Museum for details.