COLLABORATION with photographer Donatien Breiner

Andrée WESCHLER, visual artist, involved in performance art and Donatien BREINER, photographer, have come together for an artistic project where their worlds intertwine. Together they explore the ephemeral and the invisible by visiting abandoned places, forgotten wastelands and foggy countrysides of northern Alsace. Andrée integrates dresses loaded with history, each fabric carrying memories and emotions of the past, while Donatien captures this depth thanks to vintage photographic lenses, inherited and carrying memory. Together, they reveal the unknown and the elusive, creating works that transcend time and touch the timeless.

EARTH, FIRE and DREAMS by Andrée Weschler and Javier Canales 2017-2021

Earth, Fire and Dreams is a contemporary artistic meeting in a frame of history and tradition. The project is the result of a collaboration between the French artist Andrée Weschler and the Chilean artist Javier Canales, who have been devoting themselves for four years to creative research and artistic practice in relation to territory, body, earth and history with clay as the unifying element. It is the material with which they pay hommage to ancestors and contemporaries, from the origins of the Austral Aboriginal peoples to the concept of the "Forgotten". Always in search of new aesthetics, they explore the various possibilities of contemporary expression offered by clay. Javier Canales is inspired by an old tribe that lived in Tierra del Fuego in the extreme south of Patagonia. 6000 years ago, the Selk'nam were close to nature, respectful of the earth, and would have had a lot to teach us. Andrée Weschler pays homage to artists and models who have been forgotten in order to immortalise figures that society venerates. Her work is a tribute to those who have worked on the statues that line the roads in the countryside and mark important places for the protection of passersby.

The collaboration of Earth, Fire and Dreams has been exhibited at:

Museo Martin Gusinde in Puerto Williams, Navarino Island, Chile

Ateliers Mommen, Brussels, Belgica

Biennale Arte Dolomiti, Italy

Regional Museo of Magallanes, in Punta Arenas, Chile

Musée de la Poterie de Betschdorf, France 

Casa Azul Cultural Center Gallery in Punta Arenas, Chile

Prayer for Unfaithful Women, 2015

The are many stories about unfaithful women. For instance in my hometown in France, during Middle Age, unfaithful women were put into a cage and submerged into the river. If the woman was still alive after 10 minutes it meant that she was faithful.

The Prayer for Unfaithful Women is an art performance about women who consorted with German soldiers during world war II. They were humiliated and had their head shaved in public on the main square.

This art performance is a visual denunciation of the rage under the guise of an angelic prayer.

It is about French memory.

We carry with us from our history.

Andrée Weschler

Can a first performance be truly relived? [2003-2015]

Can a first performance be truly relived? [2003-2015] 

In 2003, I finally accepted that I was living in Singapore and that my time in Japan was over. I decided then that it was about time to meet artists and to look for a space for an exhibition. Lee Wen invited me to participate to the first FOI. It was the first time I was invited to an art event, I was very happy to be invited but the last thing I wanted to do in my art practice and in my entire life was a live performance! However I thought that if I refused, I may never be invited anymore, so I said yes. For three weeks, I was completely petrified, worried, and tense.EndFragment

My performance was titled after Jean-Pierre Enard’s book 'To make little hoods blush'.

How the performance surprised me! It was an enthralling feeling as if I were a puppet conducted by a mysterious puppeteer.

Since then my relationship with performance has vacillated between love and hate.

For FOI 10, I will try to re-do my first performance art as if it were the first time. Can a first performance be truly relived? [2003-2015]


Eulogy by Andrée Weschler and Sabrina Koh, 2015

By common definition, Eulogy (noun) is a speech or a piece of writing that praises someone or something highly, especially a tribute to someone (who has just died). In this duo exhibition by Andrée Weschler and Sabrina Koh, the installation suggests an independent view from each artist, and alternatively, where both settings meet.

Flaneur presents the two artists will make tribute to the people and objects which they have lost along their domestic journey, and perhaps in their own meeting point, to relive those settings in context of the other’s. Andrée Weschler is interested in giving her eulogy to the lost domesticate(d) objects that carry the journey of home stories, while Sabrina Koh aims to reposition and p(raise) the relationships we build in a domestic setting; given or not.

"In this confessional piece of work, we thought about the 'silent' sent-offs of loved ones and objects, and have found that particularly inspiring and relevant to the roots in this metropolis home." - Andrée Weschler and Sabrina Koh

Amputation, 2006

Amputation is an installation of medical tools hypothesizing failure as the naissance of healing: one needs to be sick before one can heal. The installation’s tools belonged to Andrée’s family doctor who was simultaneously caregiver and spectator to her and her family’s lives. This work is done in his memory

Singapore Art Museum

 

If you Imagine my Dear that ... , 2011

“If you imagine my dear that is going to last forever the season of love, you got it all wrong” are the lyrics of a French poem

Si tu t’imagines, by Raymond Queneau, written in 1950 and interpreted by Juliette Gréco.

The images and the material of the video & pictures are taken from a surgery the artist went through. The surgeon, after the surgery gave the video and said: “ Since you are an artist, I thought that you will be interested in it.” The trauma of the surgery over, it took three years to face the brutal reality of the images and dare to look at them and finally do an art work with it.

French poem translated in English:

“If you imagine, if you imagine, girl girl,  if you imagine, that is going to last forever the season of  the season of season of love,you got it all wrong girl, you got it all wrong

If you think my dear, if you think  that your rosy complexion, your hourglass figure, your cute biceps, your nails, your nymph’s thigh and your light-hearted foot, if you think my dear that is going to last forever, you got it all wrong girl, you got it all wrong

Beautiful days go away, the beautiful festive days, suns and planets, all turn in circles, but you my dear, you walk straight, towards what you cannot see, approaching very sneakily, the swift wrinkle, the heavy fat, the triple chin, the limp muscle, come on pick roses, the roses of life and may their petals be the slack sea of all the happiness. Come on pick, if you do not,  you got it all wrong, girl girl, you got it all wrong”

 

Some Flowers to Make it Look Beautiful, 2004

Flower n. 

1. that part of a plant that produces seeds.

2. the flower of, the finest part of

3. the flower of speech, ornamental phrase

Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English

 

Domesticated in her Animality, 200

“The video lasts 45 minutes. I look in the video camera as if it is a mirror. The video camera becomes a conduit from the private space to the public place.
I pluck my eyebrows, one hair after the other, one by one. At first the process is constructive, the eyes get bigger, the face prettier. But the process does not stop and suddenly removing hair one by one becomes destructive. 
A simple act of everyday becomes definitive.”

Andrée Weschler, 2002

The Venus in Furs, 2006

Video Performance

“It was a large oil painting, done in the robust full-bodied manner of the Belgian school. Its subject was strange enough. A beautiful woman with a radiant smile upon a face, with abundant hair tied into a classical knot, on which white powder lay like soft hoarfrost, was resting on an ottoman, supported on her left arm. She was nude under her dark furs. Her right hand played with a lash, while her bare foot rested carelessly on a man lying before her like a slave, like a dog”

Venus in Furs, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (page 59, Blast Books, New York)

 

The Hairy Virgin

The Hairy Virgin is a true story of a girl whose entire body was covered with hair. She was introduced to the King Charles the 4th, Emperor and King.

In his book “Histoires Prodigieuses”, Pierre Boaistuau explains that during her pregnancy, the mother of the Hairy Virgin had seen a statue of Saint John that was covered with animal fur. With the power of her imagination, the mother “transferred” the hair onto the body of her forthcoming baby. The maternal imagination has the power to shape the progeny, it is called the “monstrous imagination”.

“A hairy virgin was shown completely covered with hair like a bear; she was born thus deformed and hideous because her mother had gazed too intensely upon an effigy of St John dressed in animal skins which hung at the foot of her bed when she conceived.

It is certain that these monstrous creatures most often are the consequence of divine judgment, justice, punishment, and curse; horrified by their sin, God allows [women] to produce such abominations because they hurl themselves forward indifferently, like savage beasts that only follow their appetites, with no consideration of age, place, time, and the other laws established by Nature”

Pierre Boaistuau, Histoires prodigieuses, 1560

The Choir, 2003

I don’t know how to explain my art. I don’t know how to tell it. If I try, I have the impulse to be faithless, to betray it, to empty it, to steal its soul. When I look at my work I read it; my artwork talks and responds to me. We were “one” for a while but now it is one by itself. It is not me anymore. Nevertheless there is still a lot of me in it. Sometimes I am uncomfortable, other times it bothers me, I feel unveiled, and some other time I am surprised. To explain it is giving to the origin of the artwork.

Where does the idea come from? I don’t know where my ideas come from. They come from the fact that I am born that winter in 1963 in France, that I grew up in a little closed village in Alsace, that I am the third child of a family of four, that my father is my father and that he gave me what he gave me, that my mother is my mother and that I love her for that. That my mother tongue is French but I was cradled in “Alsatian” (German dialect). That I drink coffee in the morning and that I eat what I eat. An idea is a chemical reaction that I cannot explain. I find. I create. When I worked on this project as I always do I was living and breathing through it. All I was perceiving, reading, seeing, dreaming was through it.

Sometimes I have ideas that are like explosions coming out from my pores.

I believe in a conceptual instincts.

In this work I talk about my childhood, the world I come from. The Sunday masses, women sitting on the left benches, men sitting on the right benches. The aisles in the middle. I am telling my childhood, what I saw, what I heart, what I perceived.

My dreams.

My reality.

Andrée Weschler

 

Innocence #03

ICASTICA 2013, First Women Biennale, Arezzo, Italy

Picture by Anita Vozza

Italy 2013 Picture by Anita Vozza

Italy 2013 Picture by Anita Vozza

Innocence

“In 2006, my life was a desert. Everybody seemed busy, active, alive, while I was a prisoner in my own apartment. Nothing was happening in my life, and I felt I was a thing among others in my home. One day I received from a friend a pack of clay. I started to roll small pearls of porcelain from the clay for no reason. They were cute. To escape from my lethargy, every night I rolled pearls made of porcelain, like Penelope weaving her tapestry while waiting for Ulysses, except that in my story there was no Ulysses. All the pearls together became a very long necklace of a few metres; very beautiful, very difficult to move, very heavy.”

This was some years ago and for me it is now impossible to repeat that work. Everything has changed since then: the others and I. Therefore the symbolism of the pearls has evolved as well. This time the necklace will weight 50 kilogrammes to embody my 50 years of life. It was a spontaneous idea that I had, which I expressed the idea with joy; 50 is a number so easily said but 50 kilogrammes of porcelain can be tedious and laborious.

 

Italy 2013 Picture by Anita Vozza

Italy 2013 Picture by Anita Vozza