A nameless response: performance by Marie Goudot
Nairy Baghramian’s sculptural practice calls into mind constantly the human body and its movements. By following a distinctive logic of fabrication, marked by gestures, and pressures on forms and surfaces, she creates tensions and a sense of movement.
Invited by WIELS, choreographer Marie Goudot enters into dialogue with Baghramian’s exhibition nameless, activating its spatial and temporal aspects through the body.
This choreographic performance unfolds continuously from the opening to the closing of the exhibition (11:00–18:00).
Photo: Robbrecht Desmet
A nameless response…
where naming eludes us, where a sensual territory emerges, raised by the materials and media that compose Nairy Baghramian's work.
In resonance with the exhibition, Marie Goudot offers a performance of presence, over the course of a weekend, engaging the gaze and the body to react directly to the works as they present themselves to us. She opens up a space, a pause between what we perceive and what it could be, between the visible and what can be hinted at.
The focus is on what is hidden, what escapes the initial glance. A work exhibited here does not always reveal itself entirely: the hidden part possesses a beauty equivalent to that which is revealed when the viewer's body agrees to turn, move and explore. What is hidden beneath the surface? The answer is articulated in movement, a translation is sketched out in real time. Here, the body can neither hide nor be named.
Marie Goudot's steady gaze becomes a mirror: it generates interpretations, sudden flashes, fragments of images captured on the spot and reproduced live, evoking a feeling of ‘uncanny strangeness’.
The performance takes place in an unstable space, where naming is not enough to give meaning, where language fails to fix what remains fluid, sensitive and undetermined.
Performance: Marie Goudot
Conception: Marie Goudot, Michael Pomero et Julien Monty
Production: Youngsters asbl
Executive production: Entropie Production
Photos: Robbrecht Desmet
Text: Julien Monty
With contributions from Robin Haghi and Anika Edström Kawaji.