Dépaysé explores the intimate connection between the Canadian artist and his work. The exhibition at Fotografie Forum Frankfurt features fifty black and white photographs and an oversized hand-made artist book. This body of work was developed on the margins of the artist’s many photographic projects over a forty-year career.
For Clément, photography has always been closely related to the book, particularly with the idea that an image refers to other images. On the one hand, it signifies that an image is a leaky container – smoke, fog, streams and rivers, reflections, and streets running across the image. On the other, Clément constantly questions the power of the photographic image to capture reality.
The title of exhibition is a French term that describes the condition of being “out of place”, feeling “strange” or “lost”. As a visual journey into the heart of urban solitude and its periphery, Serge Clément’s work irresistibly draws the viewer into an intimate relationship with the image. It is not important to know whether the place captured in the image is Montreal, Lyon, Tokyo or New York; rather the viewer should lose himself between several places. Clément is a master of the play of mirrors and of deceptive transparencies, of subtle filtering meant to disorient the viewer and to make him move between real and imaginary space. This space is made up of intimacy, secrets, silence and solitude. Clément thus confronts us with a surreal strangeness.
Serge Clément (*1950, born in Valleyfield, Canada) has been a photographer since the beginning of the 70s. His works have been exhibited worldwide in several solo exhibitions and are part of numerous private and public collections.
The exhibition was curated by Catherine Bédard and Celina Lunsford. It is a cooperation with Canadian Cultural Centre Paris and Embassy of Canada in Berlin. Dépaysé has also toured to Diffusion: Cardiff International Festival of Photography.
FFF Fotografie Forum Frankfurt21
Nov 2015 – 25 Jan 2016
Braubachstr. 30-32
60311 Frankfurt (Main)
www.fffrankfurt.org
