Artist: Caroline Thiery
Exhibition title: Whatever remains from the ghosts
Venue: Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain, Brest, France
Date: February 18 – May 14, 2022
Photography: Aurélien Mole / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain
For almost three months Caroline Thiery (1997, France) took part in the ‘Workshop residency’ programme run by Document d’Artistes Bretagne and Passerelle at the art centre. The result of this is the exhibition ‘Whatever remains from the ghosts’ which includes works produced on site during the residency.
Caroline Thiery’s ghosts are common and known to us all. They manufacture the past: vague feelings, memories of conversations, songs that keep playing endlessly in our heads, fleeting smiles on public transport and many other traces of everyday life. Generously sharing her experiences, Caroline Thiery plots a map of our social relationships, of love and friendship, family and culture. She looks in particular at our search for love and affection, subject to tension from the ambivalent desire for independence. She examines the new ways of meeting people such as the dating apps that have revolutionised the way we ‘consume’ relationships. The use of digital communication and the Internet, which does away with any notion of waiting or distance, has transformed dating behaviour both for better and for worse: the sending of dick pics (photos of penises) to strangers, the use of pick-up lines, little phrases intended to be romantic but in fact often clumsy or even offensive, and other new phenomena. Thanks to the digital world, seeking a relationship or a sexual partner has never been so easy for someone eager for passion, hidden behind his or her phone, lying under the duvet or scrolling while sitting on the toilet. The exhibition title also evokes ‘ghosting’, a very widespread practice since the appearance of dating sites, involving the ending of a relationship with no warning, by breaking off all forms of communication.
In addition to matters of the heart, Caroline Thiery questions our relationship with childhood and adolescence, creating various talismans and totemic objects which forge a possible past, like the ‘ghostly tartans’ with dog or swan motifs or a tropical landscape, decorated with texts. Where the adult world looks down on certain adolescent interests such as ‘fanfiction’ (writing stories based on works of fiction, films, games or series) or their attraction to pop music sometimes seen as kitsch, Caroline Thiery decides to take these practices and elevate them as symbols. She therefore produces a sculpture in honour of the singer Priscilla who found fame at the age of 12. Highlighting this French pop star means rehabilitating this devalued culture from an age of transition we have all lived through and which has made us what we are.
Text holds an essential place in the exhibition both because of narratives written by the artist, available to read in the rooms, and by the multiplication of phrases and words at the very heart of the works. The culture of the Internet meme (an element or phenomenon taken up and disseminated to a mass audience by the Internet, often an image with text added) is a vast source of inspiration. Memes are punchlines, slogans in a very particular context which sometimes require highly specialised knowledge of codes of comprehension. In the work of
Caroline Thiery, they take on original forms, they are funny, intimate, often universal. The anecdotes and stories, visual and written, used by the artist, interweave across each other eliciting no replies; it is up to the visitor to create their own history.
