The Dispossessed
The title of Elika Hedayat's exhibition, Les Depossédés, is borrowed from the book of the same name by the American science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, now considered one of the most influential figures in American literature. Interested in the ethical and spiritual question of otherness and taking into account the gaze of the other, Ursula K. Le Guin tackles current concerns such as the testing of the social bond, gender binarism, feminism, man in the kingdom of the living, ecological threats, colonisation, the expansion or disappearance of human species.
Elika Hedayat's multi-disciplinary exhibition project is based on the same questions and the same feeling of being dispossessed, through the representation of an imaginary and chaotic world, crossed by her own experience. It is a work of profound and powerful unity, in which the artist favours the mute evidence of her drawings, paintings and in situ frescoes, creating a body of work that is all the more eloquent for forcing the viewer to linger over the relevance of its subject matter.
Freeing herself from any decorative or ornamental conception, Elika Hedayat shows a world inspired by real events, ranging from the revolt of the Iranian people to the ragged tree chapel in a French village, and including universal contemporary concerns such as ecology and gender identity.
His characters - human and animal - the sites, the cities are all objects of escape. His figures - multiple and yet familiar to each other - seem to hang by a thread: the desire to explain the world. The whole of the Les dépossédés series represents both lost freedom and the risk of trying to regain it.
Using other media - fresco, drawing, animation, video - the artist places characters and signs outside all the itineraries and limitations inherent in today's society.
She plays on a genuine insubordination to the established order to push her pictorial reality into the realm of poetry. In her work, she constantly appeals to the forces of rupture that we have often forgotten: emotion, imagination, the desire for happiness and for paying the price for it. It is an almost faceless humanity that exists. Space absorbs beings and things, and we could talk of reification if it weren't for the sense of tragedy in the artist's work, which, beyond things, very clearly concerns the human being.
His characters - human and animal - the sites, the cities are all objects of escape. His figures - multiple and yet familiar to each other - seem to hang by a thread: the desire to explain the world. The whole of the Les dépossédés series represents both lost freedom and the risk of trying to regain it.
Using other media - fresco, drawing, animation, video - the artist places characters and signs outside all the itineraries and limitations inherent in today's society.
She plays on a genuine insubordination to the established order to push her pictorial reality into the realm of poetry. In her work, she constantly appeals to the forces of rupture that we have often forgotten: emotion, imagination, the desire for happiness and for paying the price for it. It is an almost faceless humanity that exists. Space absorbs beings and things, and we could talk of reification if it weren't for the sense of tragedy in the artist's work, which, beyond things, very clearly concerns the human being.
Opening:
September 23, 2023, from 4 p.m to 7 p.m