Number 63, March 2004 Persona

EN:

Yinka Shonibare's works can be characterized in terms of their powerful deconstruction of Western notions of identity. In this light, the artist's embrace of the figure of the dandy is decisive, for it signals the complex play of forces underlying the social construction of selfhood. The author argues that dandyism offers Shonibare a historical model upon which to enact his critique of subjectivity. Moreover, dandyism traverses the very logic of Shonibare's practice, thus creating a tension between history and an immanent critique of its categories. The ontology of the figure of the dandy is analyzed in order to stress the reflective nature of its activity. This ultimately grounds Shonibare's simultaneous critique of historical dandyism and the artist's understanding of the self in terms of dandyism's inherent masquerade.

FR:

La photographe new-yorkaise Nikki Lee utilise l’instantané pour explorer les limites de l’identité et de l’appartenance, c’est-à-dire la perception que nous avons de nous-mêmes et celle des autres lorsqu’ils nous voient dans notre entourage. La photographe d’origine coréenne pratique une performance de l’identité : elle s’inscrit dans ses propres images, devenant elle-même le sujet du document dont elle a construit le contexte et fait la mise en scène. Ses images suscitent un questionnement sur l’intégrité faussement factuelle de l’instantané, de la culture et de la communauté, tout en faisant appel aux attentes narratives par l’usage de l’instantané.

EN:

During a stay in Paris, Sorel Cohen set up her camera in different psychoanalysts' offices. The result was a series of images around the analyst's couch, the body that we must divine by its very absence, and the challenge of showing the unshowable, of capturing a site of intimacy in a flickering that leaves it to its finishing, or its famishing ... for if the desire is there - the desire to see, to know - it must constandy be reawoken. One work, in fact, is called Désir, désir, désir: in it, might we hear the quiet music of the artist, who for many years photographed around beds before falling upon couches?