Artist: Alina Chaiderov
Exhibition title: Hold the Silence
Venue: Antoine Levi, Paris, France
Date: September 17 – November 7, 2015
Photography: Claire Dorn, images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Antoine Levi, Paris
Galerie Antoine Levi is pleased to present Hold the Silence, Alina Chaiderov’s first solo show in Paris.
The four exhibited installations tell the story of four moments in the private and professional life of Chaiderov. The first installation, a photograph pasted onto a mirror slab reclining over a stack of bed-sheets, narrates the chronology of the artist’s stay at a hospital. An inventory of everyday objects, the photograph was taken during an improvised exhibition that Chaiderov organised for her friends and the other patients during that very sojourn; the stack of white bedsheets and the mirror conjure up the hospital room and the daily concern for the objects that, here taken out of their usual context, convey the artist’s own reaction and become the excuse for an exhibition.
Starting from the aforementioned concepts of immobility and restriction, the two steel sculptures refer back to the notion of “inhabiting a space”. The metallic cage framing a volley ball trapped in a hay-sack invokes simultaneously the idea of stagnation and movement: the well-defined and stiff lines of the steel contrast with the delicate meanders of the sack, whose ascension emphasises the verticality of the gallery.
The second steel sculpture, the one that is seemingly depicting a human crawling over the floor, is covered with a slab of plexiglass that the artist has been using for a long time to cut paper; the traces of this activity are still visible on the surface and form a counterpoint to the “movement in power” of the whole sculpture.
In the last installation, the concept of heaviness is accentuated by concrete bricks resting and flattening down a drawing pad, as an ironic staging of what artistic creation signifies for Chaiderov. The arrangement in the shape of a cross reanimates the sacred nature of the extant connection between artist and life, between life and art.
