From the encounter between Lee Shulman / The Anonymous Project and Omar Victor Diop was born Being There series, at the crossroads of the two artists’ universes. As a specialist of self-portraits, the Senegalese photographer introduces himself into the vernacular slide images of The Anonymous Project collection. Work of staging and re-assembling of the images orchestrated by Shulman, the series revisits in about sixty works the archetypes of the Trente Glorieuses society. These augmented pictures question the foundations of our contemporary society. By repairing absence, Being There opens a conversation on our history.
Binome and Magnin-A galleries, who respectively represent both artists, associate so as to unveil Being There at Paris Photo. An unprecedented collaboration between the two artists and their galleries, in support of a powerful project, showcased in parallel in an eponymous publication at Textuel edition.
“The duo play with this fluctuation between the trivial and the extraordinary that makes it possible to comment on and question history. The fictional scenarios created by Shulman and Diop rewrite history and recount the past. The French philosopher Henri Lefebvre wrote: ‘In our era, one of the most recent forms which criticism of everyday life has taken is criticism of the real by the surreal.’ This contemporary ‘surrealism’ is activated by the transformative power of performance: the pose becomes an intervention that denounces appearances and makes history explicit. The playful embedding reveals the isolation of the Other; the body becomes a sign of resistance to conformity as well as to political and social regulations. The outsider forces himself on an ‘inside’ previously inaccessible because of the homogeneity of the milieu. In this respect, it is interesting to note that, as early as the nineteenth century, the abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth demanded that Black Americans be granted the right to representation by being allowed to access portrait studios. In these circumstances, one easily understands the disturbing power of Diop’s presence in these images.”
[extract]Trouble and Subversion in the Land of the Vernacular: Critique of a Blind Everyday by Taous Dahmani - Being There, Textuel edition (Fall 2023 release)
