Anaïs Chabeur

“Anaïs Chabeur crafts poetic atmospheres, invitations to inhabit time consciously. For her solo exhibition at V2Vingt, the artist pursues her research on memorial processes, bodily ties and finitude. Consisting of two new installations – lighting and olfactive – and a film, the intimate and subtle presentation created by Anaïs Chabeur slips into yet unexplored spaces of the industrial building hosting the exhibition venue. The sensorial meditations deployed propose different relationships to the world, to oneself and to others. Anaïs Chabeur’s esthetics of care and attention opens to transitory spaces questioning the heritage and cultural constructions of our relationship to death. In V2Vingt, the dialogue between the artworks slowly produces a distortion sheltering imaginings and enabling a meeting of individual and collective experiences.”

Though, all the room be motionless
solo exhibition at V2Vingt in Brussels
curated by Antoinette Jattiot

Texte de l’exposition
Article dans l’Art Même 85 par Septembre Tiberghien

The Hour of the Cat

The visitor is given a lighter at the entrance.
They first encounter a fabric with silkscreened instructions in three languages.
They step into the empty exhibition room lit with bright neons, on the opposite wall a door gives access to an emptied out storage space, they walk through the room to reach it.
In this backstage space, a chair is placed in front of a window covered with a discreet blurring filter, two brass plates are held by thin steel rods sticking out of the wall. One holds incense pieces, the other a white powder which enables the incense to burn through. The smoke moves through the light, enters the body of the visitor.
As the visitor spends time there, the light in the exhibition room slowly shifts to a dimmed intensity.
They cross back to visit the rest of the exhibition, showing the works AND CARE OF THE DEAD and Rehearsal.

The title refers to the fact that amongst all the animals of the zodiac dividing the day into 12 segments, there is no hour of the cat, however, somewhere else and at another period, cat’s pupils where used to read time.

AND TAKE CARE OF THE DEAD is based on a double page of the book First Aid in the Home, published in 1946 by Odhams Press, London. As a general first aid guide, it gives information on how to bandage, bruises and contusions, as well as surgical nursing, air raids and war gases. This last chapter of the book gives step by step instruction on how to care for the dead. The book is part of Lisa Wilkens library and was shared with Anaïs Chabeur during their time together at HISK. The double page was reproduced as a photopolymer plate and printed on a Heidelberger Press at La Cambre in Brussels.

Rehearsal, Video HD, with sound, 10’30’’

A neighbor’s storage room full of books was lent for the exhibition of this film. The film Rehearsal takes the form of a choreography : four hands repeat gestures of care while different shapes alternate beneath a thick cloak. They delimitate, press and rub these unknown figures as to accompany them in a transition. How can you approach the strangeness of a body at once lifeless and present? Can you only anticipate, think, “learn” the movements and the langage to support such passage?

Images and excerpt here