“What arrives to us here, in full face, unexpectedly, it is not the usual matter of curiosity […], this precious booty, it was not within the reach of an ordinary tourist, or even to an ethnologist of the usual model, to conquer it […] Pierre Verger does not say all, and does not show all. For he is also a wise man.”

Foreword by Théodore Monod, in Pierre Verger, Dieux d’Afrique, Paris: Paul Hartmann, 1954.

The exhibition “Photographier les vodous: Catherine De Clippel” is the first part of a two-phase research project entitled “Ce qui nous arrive ici, en plein visage,” a French expression of Theodore Monod meaning “What arrives to us here, in full face.’’ The exhibition “Amexica: Marie Baronnet” (04.03 – 04.06.2023) will form the second and final part.

In Western culture, the Voodoo religion has long been considered as a web of bloody and evil superstitions. We have allowed ourselves to categorise Voodoo in the same way as magic or witchcraft, relegating Voodoo cults to the rank of primitive, ancestral, entrenched practices. However, Voodoos are contemporary to us. Established since immemorial times, they coexist alongside Christianity and Islam. Its “pantheon” includes the main figures of Mawu-Lisa, Hevieso, Sakpata and others surrounding them, such as Egu, Mami Watta, Dan and Zangbeto.

“Miserable forms of art” (Georges Bataille), the Voodoos are these soft, dripping, ill-defined forms, with a vaguely anthropomorphic silhouette, drowned in a magma of crusted matter made up of an accumulation of various objects, all of which shine under jets of oil, water, blood, alcohol and spittle.

Photography leads us straightly to the heart of things through the concrete singularities it can pictures and by its proximity to the ritual. Voodoo, in Catherine De Clippel’s photographic experience, refers to the optical idea of the hole, of an orifice set up in the darkroom. A place and a moment, a sensory experience that must be intentionally and effectively renewed in order to ward off external threats. What difference do we find between the dark room and the closed enclosure of voodoo? In both, people, whether Western or not, seek appeasement and therapy and long to find the harmony of an always fragile and subjective world.
If the facts are obscure, they are no less stubborn. They appear, fruits of chance and daily observation, and accumulate, orphaned, before finding their place in an organized discourse, temporarily. Visual anthropology builds its object in the mistrust of the word to inscribe others. More accurate, for a time, because closer to the

Biography

Catherine De Clippel (born in 1940 in Aalst, Belgium) is a photographer, director and producer of documentary films. Founder of Acmé films, she follows anthropologists Marc Augé and Jean-Paul Colleyn, and co-produces, with Arte, INA and RTBF, a series of films on animist practices in Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, Pakistan and India since the early 1980s.

The documentary series Vivre avec les dieux, meaning “Living with the Gods” takes her on a journey mainly across Togo and Benin to discover Voodoo, which she has been photographing since 1988. From 2002, her work is exhibited in international institutions: Museum d’histoire naturelle in Lyon, Museum Rietberg of Zurich, Mudec in Milan, Milwaukee Art Museum, Post Vidai Contemporary Art Collection in Hô Chi Minh City. Catherine De Clippel shows her photographs at the musée de l’Homme alongside those of ethnologist Jean Rouch (Paris, 2017) and at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (Paris, 2019).

In Benin, in 2019, she pursues her research around Voodoo and collaborates with the visual artist Dominique Zinkpè as part of an exhibition at Le Centre gallery in Abomey-Calavi. The publication Vivre avec les dieux, co-written with Marc Augé, Jean-Paul Colleyn and Jean-Pierre Dozon, was issued by the Maison des sciences de l’homme in 2019, followed by Photographier les vodous, Togo-Benin 1988-2019 (Paris, Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2020).

In 2022, the Mougins Center of Photography dedicates a solo show bringing together still and moving images from the Voodoo series shot in Togo and Benin.

© Catherine De Clippel
Vodou Zangbeto
1989
Séko (Togo)
Inkjet print on Rice paper Hahnemühle
135 x 90 cm

© Catherine De Clippel
Hache du vodou Hevieso
1988
Aklakou (Togo)
Tirage jet d’encre sur Rice paper Hahnemühle
135 x 90 cm

Les Dieux-Objets
Togo, 1989
51 min, 16 mm, colour
Directors : Jean-Paul Colleyn et Catherine De Clippel
Scientific consultants : Marc Augé et Jean-Pierre Dozon
Production : Acmé films, RTBF, La Sept, ORSTOM, avec le concours de la RTSR et de FR3

Curators: Jérôme Sother, François Cheval and Yasmine Chemali

Coproduction with Le Centre d’Art GwinZegal, Guingamp

This exhibition takes part of the Rencontres d’Arles program as part of the Grand Arles Express manifestation

The body of work consisting of several series that are now “historical”, draws us deep into the atmosphere of Thatcher and post-Thatcher England. An ill wind had long since begun to blow in Liverpool. And when Tom Wood arrived on the scene, it was still blowing, harshly. A succession of events, such as the closing of the shipyards, add together and repeat to paint a coherent picture of a particular universe, of a period, a class war, of which soon only a few traces, and some portraits of rare nobility, portraits cleared of any heroic pathos, will remain. It has never been easy for photography to escape heroization. In its keenness to construct allegorical, hence irreal, attitudes of the human condition, photography has sometimes instrumentalised suffering and misery. It has, in fact, underestimated the often more meaningful singularities. In the desire to affirm photographic standards, wanting to contract a “moral” alliance with a community of “modest folk”, with the “small people”, is a challenge, even a provocation. Tom Wood has risen tirelessly to this challenge, liberating photographic empathy from the purgatory in which it was vegetating.

Biography

Tom Wood, from Irish origins and born in 1951 (County Mayo), takes photographs almost every day. After studying fine arts at the Leicester Polytechnic from 1973 to 1976, he moved with his family to Merseyside in 1978. Fascinated by experimental cinema, he then turned to photography, learning about the medium on his own. Self-taught, he remained faithful to chemistry, paper, and the darkroom. He experimented relentlessly with technique, from the simplest to the most elaborate (from expired film to panoramic photography). Between 1978 and 2001, he roamed the city of Liverpool and the banks of the Mersey, with his Leica 35, and painted a portrait of the city and its residents: streets, pubs, clubs, markets, building sites, parks and football stadiums. This candid portrait of the working-class populations in industrial wastelands and abandoned places forms a body of work without equal in contemporary photography.

Tom Wood’s work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions around the world. In France, he has been shown in festivals, as part of the Sit Down Gallery or at the Centre photographique GwinZegal in Guingamp (2012) and the Château d’Eau in Toulouse (2005). His photographs have been included in the collections of MoMA and ICP in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. In 2002, Tom Wood received the “Humanity Dialogue Prize” at the Rencontres d’Arles.

Curators: François Cheval and Yasmine Chemali

The third exhibition of the Mougins Center of Photography has been conceived through the prism of chance. Through it, we approach a relationship with the unexpected and with the tenuous quest for balance between mastery and letting go that is constantly challenged by photographers.

Who better than the Japanese photographer Yuki Onodera or the Chinese photographer Li Lang to plunge us into a work in progress?

In the time of Pliny the Elder, the idea of chance was already associated with the act of creation. In his work, Li Lang (born in 1969, Chengdu) let chance enter the field of the making and let it provoke the action through a suite of questions that are a priori irrelevant. Li Lang captures one image per minute as he travels in a high-speed train for 4600 kilometers. His journey is accompanied by personal questions asked to fifty volunteers. Is Li Lang the author of an algorithm or the victim of chance?

Fortuitous chance. Lucky/Happy chance. Well-thought chances. Yuki Onodera creates a precise framing to offer a tangible reality that has nothing real about it. In her series “Darkside of the Moon”, she invites the viewer (or imposes to the viewer?) anew temporality, fluid territories, that of a square. The square is by essence the only figure that is not present in Nature; it is contrary to the order of things and a manifestation of Man’s suprematism over Nature.

Both Li Lang and Yuki Onodera remind us, with each gesture and each print, of our relationship to the world. They remind us that “we have modern tools to see everything in the world, to apprehend everything, but [qu’] in fact we see nothing”. (Sophie Riestelhueber in her commentary on Marcel Duchamp’s and Man Ray’s “Dust Breeding”)

Born in Chengdu in China’s Sichuan province in 1969, Li Lang began his career as a photographer in 1990. He currently lives and works in Chengdu.
Through his images, Lang has often explored humanity and desires. Photography serves as a trigger for the awakening of a long-suppressed self.
Lang captures real life events with calmness and precision. He draws inspiration from and includes in his work the life experience of others, with the aim of obtaining more diversified existential experience of ourselves, of others and of life. Lang creates an intangible relationship between people and photography, and makes us think about the relationship between modernity and photography.
Lang has won The Punctum Award at Lianzhou Foto Festival (China, 2019) and the Special Jury Prize (Lianzhou, China, 2015). In 1998, he recieved the top prize of Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography Awards and “The Mother Jones Medal of Excellence” (1998). His works have been collected by many institutions including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (USA), Shanghai Art Museum (China), the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (Spain), Guangdong Museum of Art (China), LUXELAKES- A4 Art Museum (Chengdu, China), White Rabbit Gallery (Sydney, Australia).
The exhibition at the Mougins Center of Photography is his first show in France.

Curators: François Cheval and Yasmine Chemali

For its second exhibition, L’amour toujours (Love, Eternally), the Mougins Center of Photography once again celebrates female photography while inviting Natasha Caruana and Jenny Rova. Their works result from personal stories told through familiar experiences.

Photographers are not immune to emotional experience! Whether women or men, all share in the ordeal of romantic relationships with a partner, subjected to the mystery of desire like everyone else. But how do they speak of this today? And are they capable of finding an original form linked to the medium of photography to describe the indescribable?
Historically, excluding portraits of the beloved being, the object of desire or the muse, narratives of coupledom and the complexity of private life are recent. And quite often, they are produced by women photographers seeking to inscribe their work in the general movement of ideas prevailing since the 1970s.

Jenny Rova and Natasha Caruana, clear-sighted, have no particular difficulty in conveying the question of romantic commerce. They are attempting a new iconographic approach to this human invariant, the basis of everything. Their works are essentially reflection turned action on the senses, the sexual body and relationships between the sexes.
For Jenny, the main character in her photo series, romantic passion dominates above all, and for this reason, the consequences of a burning flame must be accepted. Natasha, meanwhile, defines her position through an interrogation of the male gaze. She plays, to some extent, with what animates male desire. We are led into universes in which fiction and autobiography mingle.

Jenny Rova (b. Sweden, 1972) turns her private life into elements for display. The four series of what will be her first solo show in France reveal her singular work.
Originally, this Swedish photographer worked in documentary photography. After finishing up her studies of the medium in Prague, Rova moved to Zurich, where she developed a radical and joyful take on romantic relationships. Separated from, but still in touch with her former partner, she began following him on social networks, discovering her ex-love’s new world, from which she was now excluded. What sort of work could she undertake on the emotions she was drowning in? How could she portray this situation whose very existence was but a mere media mirror? Rova invented a diary, a triangular drama, the existence of which she alone was aware.

Series:

Natasha Caruana (b. UK, 1983) is no longer an unknown in France. Winner of the BMW Artist in Residence Award in 2014, she has nevertheless not gotten the exposure that she deserves. For fifteen years, the British artist has been fictionally creating scenarios that recount personal relationships, the complexity of positions in a heterosexual couple. With typically British wit, Caruana structures photographic encounters using documentation and staging.
From the first series, The Other Woman, we are confronted with the secret lives of married women in extra-conjugal romantic relationships. This series introduced an original tone that subsequently developed withMarried Man – – less an interrogation of the couple than of the ongoing miracle of how it lasts, its fragility and vulnerability to temptation. All of the series hold something of a perfect illustration of the power of desire, its tiny daily perversions and untold secrets – all of which constitutes the work’s originality, never passing judgement but confronting us with the complexity of the couple as an institution. While the theme may be stinging at times (Curtain of Broken Dreams), the illusion that anything is possible still lingers in spite of everything (At First Sight) .

Series: