Emilie Brout & Maxime Marion:
A Truly Shared Love
Friday 12 March, 20:00, screening & artist talk - online via zoom
13 + 14 March: screening (on loop) in the Kunsthal Gent cinema
As part of their residency in the Development programmme, French artist duo Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion will screen their film A Truly Shared Love in avant-première for the occasion of this online Friday event, followed by an artist talk. Afterwards, the film will be on view in the Kunsthal Gent Cinema for a weekend.
A Truly Shared Love is a tragedy, and capitalism its curse. Emilie Brout & Maxime Marion show their true love story, surrounded by their cat and connected companions in their own domestic environment. Using the codes of commercial imagery of stock videos, they play with the normative and idealized representations of their genre, class and figure of artist as a model of the start-up nation that are usually conveyed there. Is there an alternative?
This piece marks an important step in the artists' practice. It could be summed up as an inextricable string game of relationships: relationships between partners of a couple, between intimate and public, leisure and work, data and synthesis, urban and vast "natural" spaces or even between species in the broadest sense... So many strata that are continuously contaminated at different levels. A constant and ambiguous space of negotiation is emerging, where the protagonists - like two drops evolving in an abyssal and paradoxically supersaturated void - desperately seek to preserve something singular beyond inaccessible representations, something that would escape any form of quantification or capitalization.
The practice of Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion (1984 and 1982, living and working in Paris) focuses on the culture and use of the web: they often work with and around the internet. Their work takes shape in different media, but they particularly explore the medium of video, whose boundaries they explore through non-linear storylines, endless videos, and the context in which the work is shown. Through careful deciphering, they try to identify the economic, political and legal specificities of existing systems or structures before infiltrating them, leaving traces or reporting on them in their work, sometimes with narrative forms. In Kunsthal Gent they will show their new film which investigates how technocapitalism can infiltrate every small aspect of our lives, and start a research of new discrete forms from and around it (installations, online dissemination...).
Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion started their collaboration at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris. Their work was included in the Young Art Triennale, Casino Luxembourg (2021), the 5th Moscow Biennale for Young Art (2016) and numerous group exhibitions including those at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Centre Culturel Canadien, Paris (2020), Prix Sciences Po pour l'art contemporain , Paris (2019), Redline Contemporary Art Center, Denver (2018), Le Loft, Brussels (2017), OCAT Shenzhen (2016), Seongnam Art Center (2015) and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2014). They have had solo exhibitions at 22,48 m², Paris (2013, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2021), La Chaufferie, Strasbourg; Pori Art Museum (2019), Villa du Parc, Annemasse (2018) and Steve Turner, Los Angeles (2017).
