Sylvie Blocher: What is Missing?

13 February – 4 April 2010

Sylvie Blocher is a leading French video artist. Her new work What Is Missing? features people from Penrith unveiling their unspoken needs, hopes, dreams and desires, and was created while Sylvie Blocher was in residence in Penrith as part of the C3West Project.

For What Is Missing? Sylvie Blocher followed a process begun in her Living Pictures series, where she invited volunteers from the community (Penrith) to appear before her camera by placing an advertisement in the local newspaper (and sometimes asking people directly on her travels through the streets and malls of the city).

When creating What Is Missing? Sylvie Blocher stipulated only two conditions for people appearing in her ‘film’: that the volunteer subjects wear their best outfit, and that they lived in Penrith.

Blocher’s interview technique often elicits responses of great candour from her subjects. Unveiling the unspoken needs, hopes, dreams and desires of individual residents of Penrith, What Is Missing? is a portrait of the city in which they live – it is challenging, provocative and riveting.

Importantly, What Is Missing? forms part of the research for the Panthers of the Future/The Future of Panthers proposal, developed by Sylvie Blocher and Campement Urbain, where they ‘imagined’ the Panthers (and Penrith) of the future.

What Is Missing? is presented in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and acknowledges the support of CultureFrance, the French Embassy, C3West, Penrith Performing & Visual Arts, Panthers World of Entertainment, Penrith City Council, ArtsNSW and the Australia Council for the Arts.

Sylvie Blocher website www.sylvieblocher.com
MCA website www.mca.com.au
Campement Urbain website http://campementurbain.org/cuv3/

Sylvie Blocher – Penrith, Panthers and Campement Urbain
Sylvie Blocher visited Sydney for a preliminary residency in Penrith at the invitation of the C3West project in late 2006. Following this visit, she made a proposition to the Panthers Entertainment Group titled The Panthers and the Future/The Future of Panthers.

The overall-aim of the project is to position the Panthers not only as a sports club, and as the owner of playrooms where people can play slot machines and win money, but also places where they can dream and aspire to better living conditions, create bonds, perform new activities that would be unique and therefore renowned throughout the whole of Australia. We suggest inventing a playful place, original and ahead of its time. A place of shared practices.

Sylvie Blocher – The Panthers of the Future/The Future of Panthers, 2007
Following this ‘proposition’ Panthers commissioned Campement Urbain to engage with the development of their 70 hectare property in Penrith – a project named Riverlink. Recognising the enormous social and cultural importance of this development, Campement Urbain provided the Panthers Entertainment Group with a visionary and imaginative story for their future.

In this ongoing project, the innovative collaboration between the Penrith Panthers, Penrith City Council, C3West and an internationally renowned art collective represents a story of the possibilities for Western Sydney, and the potential influence this region could have on urban renewal, sustainable lifestyles and community development throughout the world.

Campement Urbain
Campement Urbain is a collective formed by Sylvie Blocher and architect François Daune in the late 1990s, to create “artistic devices in order to experience new fictions in urban space, in the periphery of today’s large cities, mostly with the participation of the local population.” With a goal of “acting from within”, their work practices examine and explore notions of responsibility and sharing.

The work of Campement Urbain has had considerable international success, being included in the prestigious Venice Biennale on two occasions, in 2005 and again in 2007. In 2004, Campement Urbain won (jointly with the architect Bernard Tschumi) the competition for the International art fair Foire Internationale de l’Image, and in 2003 were recipients of the international Evens Foundation Prize for Art and Community Collaboration.

Campement Urbain is a flexible group, changing its composition according to the requirements of a specific project, and currently includes Sylvie Blocher, François Daune and Sydney based urban planner Tim Williams.

C3West
The genesis of What Is Missing? has been Sylvie Blocher’s (and Campement Urbain’s) participation in the C3West project, an exciting, long-term project for the development and presentation of high quality art projects by local, national and international artists working across Western Sydney.

The C3West project paradigm is one of engagement, and is based on a model of social and economic collaboration called ‘the 3Cs’ (Community, Culture and Commerce). The hallmark of this model is its ability to connect artists with communities and industries in new ways. The cultural projects themselves are conceived with businesses, artists and communities in a process of collaboration.

C3 West seeks to place artists at the nucleus of projects conceived in terms of social, cultural, political and economic engagement, and seeks to encourage art practice where human relations create meaning in the artworks, where a work’s success exists in a respectful social context as much as the material object. It encourages process-based forms of engagement, where audience engagement and connection shifts between reception and participation and not passivity.

C3 West is a series of projects that allow a sustained long term and resonant engagement with place, as opposed to short-lived one-off or biennale mode of engagement. C3 West seeks to extend the project sphere to include the aims of industry as well as community. It values attempts to produce identifiable outcomes for communities such as empowerment, meaningful involvement, skills transfer and employment. C3West project aims include:
– provide strategic outcomes for industry partners
– create opportunities for artists to develop their practice
– develop new audiences for contemporary art
– create a shift in perceptions about what contemporary art might be today
– innovate in regard to audience development practices.

C3West is an ongoing partnership between:
– Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
– Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest
– Casula Powerhouse
– Campbelltown Arts Centre
– University of Western Sydney.

What Is Missing? – Interview with Sylvie Blocher
The following interview with Sylvie Blocher was recorded in Paris in December 2009.

John Kirkman: Sylvie Blocher, thank you for this interview. Whilst the other writers have focused on your work, I propose to take a more personal approach ask about you.

Sylvie Blocher: Thank you for coming to Paris…

JK: You agreed with me that as an artist and as a woman you are a ‘warrior’. However, you also said that you hate to be in this situation, but that you have no choice. Why is this so? How do you face this dilemma?

SB: In a world structured by masculinity, when an artist opposes paternalism and interrogates authority, she has to transgress established conventions and prohibitions. She must infiltrate the system and sometimes claw open closed doors. That’s when she gets labelled very quickly as ‘dangerous’ or as ‘combatant’. It’s not a funny game. You need to have nerve and endurance. It’s often a waste of time. That can spark sadness. Society wants women to be beautiful and intelligent but that they stay in their place, and it’s exactly the same in the world of art!

As a woman, I see myself as a feminine feminist. I am made up of both masculine and feminine traits, and I don’t recognise myself in the image of women who want to be like men and to use the same power relations.

JK: In our talks you spoke of always wanting to be an artist, but thought this would be impossible. Why was this? How did you become an artist?

SB: When I was a child, I dreamt of becoming an artist. But I came from a family where that wasn’t possible. My father even thought it a dirty and depraved activity. I never spoke of it. I would create things alone in my corner.

JK: You speak with great feeling and affection about your mother. Can you talk about her, tell her story, and tell me how her life and personality have affected and influenced you – both as a person and an artist.

SB: My mother was part of the French Resistance. She was a teenager at the start of the war, and lived in the south of Alsace. She was finally arrested. The French government sent her to a Swiss farm just after the war, to regain ‘normality’. We never spoke about this at home. She was a heroine to me, but she nonetheless spent her life with a man who completely subordinated her. She could never realise any of her dreams. She was magnificent and yet, at the same time, I resented her for her passivity and submissiveness. She passed all her hopes on to her two children, and I found that ‘baggage’ hard to carry. She died when I was still a teenager. Her drawn-out agony and her death were unbearable for me. It was because of this sadness that I became an artist… eventually.

JK: What about your father? Can you talk about 1968?

SB: We lived alone in a village in the Ardèche region of southern France. In 1968, my father was held captive by the female workers of the textile factory he ran. When someone telephoned my mother to tell her, I remember dancing for joy around the kitchen table, hoping that these women would keep him for a long time. My father is a tough chauvinist, psychologically and physically abusive. He terrorised us. When I was a girl, he thought of me as second rate, and made me know it constantly.

JK: You said that when you were studying you had “no fathers in art”. What do you mean? How and why was this critical to your development as an artist?

SB: I didn’t go to art school, where you can begin to imitate your artistic father figures. That seemed to be the point of going there. Instead, I didn’t have to fight against the burdens of history. Everything seemed possible to me. I didn’t have any fixed position or preferred medium, but just the desire to be able to speak, to ‘take a position’, to finally become ‘a subject’. I became an artist because I couldn’t do otherwise. It was a question of survival.

JK: What about ‘Mothers in art’?

SB: (laughs) I’ve had many, but they were more like feminine figures rather than mothers! Hannah Arendt, Patti Smith, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Marguerite Duras, Angela Davis, Janis Joplin, Nina Hagen, Ulrike Meinhof, Chantal Akerman, Nico… All of them were people on the margins of the chic, bourgeois heritage of Simone de Beauvoir.

JK: How important is philosophy to your work? Which philosophers do you admire?

SB: Philosophy has been of very great importance in my life since I was 17 years old, when I first came across it at school. The teacher began with Freud and Marx! What a thought! It was like a bomb going off in my narrow world. My life changed. For me, there was now a Before and an After.

I did my university studies in Strasbourg, where the philosophers Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe taught. They were part of ‘French Philosophy’, as it was called later on, with Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Rancière, Guattari… I owe them a lot. I read a lot of the writings by Hannah Arendt, Robert Antelme and Maurice Blanchot. Jean-Luc Nancy’s book The Inoperative Community and Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish made a deep impression on me. Jacques Rancière brought me a worldly conscience that I saw in my own way in my art work.

On the other hand, all these philosophers were silent on the matter of the feminine. I regret that. Maybe they didn’t confront this matter because it questioned the very foundations of authority, including philosophical authority. The fact that the feminine exists within men is still subversive, but this has nothing to do with feminist demands for another, alternative place for women.

JK: We both admire the work of the late Gothic artists Rogier van der Weyden and Lucas Cranach. Can you talk about this admiration, and how this might be reflected in your work?

SB: During my university studies, I took courses on medieval and renaissance art and, at the same time, on aesthetics and the analysis of contemporary imagery. With medieval art, I understood that representation could comprise a way of ‘addressing the Other’. I was fascinated by the looks that certain figures addressed us with. They seemed to speak to me. In the course on aesthetics, I understood the violence and the power that the manipulation of images represents. This pushed me to find an alternative position, toward an ethical preoccupation with form.

You speak of Lucas Cranach. In fact, the bodies of his figures fascinate me because I find them fragmentary and badly proportioned. It’s their imperfection that gives them so much presence, beauty and strangeness. I like imperfection. It’s a source for my imaginary. The figures’ looks are enigmatic and full of modesty, and they oblige the viewer to make up their own interpretation.

In the Deposition by Rogier van der Weyden in the Prado Museum in Madrid, one can see a tear running from St John’s enigmatic gaze. This fragment seems close to one of my works on ecstasy. My admiration for these painters is aesthetic; I don’t have any religious rapport with them. On the contrary, what’s always interested me is to see whether it’s possible to find spirituality outside of the religious.

JK: Let’s move on to thinking about the Nazis. You told me that, to fully comprehend your work, it is essential to have an understanding of the Nazis and the Holocaust. Why?

SB: My first works were ‘plays for making life presentable’. They were hybrid forms between performance and voice.

Invited as an artist by the Avignon Festival in 1987, I, together with a young author Gerard Haller staged Figuren which spoke about the exterminations during the Second World War. We needed to understand how a part of modernity could have brought such a massive and mechanical destruction into being. Reading the texts of the deported, I found myself confronted with the unspeakable, with the unnameable. Reading Goebbels, I realised that, in addition to his hatred of Jews, he had an equally strong hatred of the feminine in men, which he saw as a sickness preventing men from becoming heroes or being in charge of nations. A lived, hated understanding of the feminine as ‘the spectre of conscience’. In the years that followed, I was interested in this feminine-within-men. I realised that its annihilation always fed into an authoritarian oneness, and that to speak of this feminine – other than in terms of homosexuality – was almost impossible.

All the authoritarian movements, the religious extremists, have this same hatred of the feminine within them that they want to subjugate (in the strongest sense of the term, that is, ‘to kill’). We all carry within us our own alterity and it is the evacuation or the murder of this doubling that spurs authoritarian acts of all sorts. We are surrounded everyday by the latent forms of Goebbels’ legacy, obsessed with this fear of a feminisation of the male body, and the feminisation of the body politic or of religion. The murder of the feminine can lead to fascism of the everyday.

But I’m not working in order to complain, nor to make exposés, but rather in a quest for emancipation. In my works, I strive to find an exit from bodily control through ‘a practice of abandonment’ and through a loosening of the holds that society and authoritarianism have on us. I know that that experimentation could only happen in art, in the space of a short instant. I am still trying nonetheless, even though I know that notions of identity that have been established by force and that are so dear to our societies of control and destruction – to the point that some people want to make us believe that they are the only principles of pleasure – will be very slow to change. We are tamed, and it’s hard to resist. We are force-fed on false desires.

JK: You also discuss the effect of hiding the truth about the collaboration of French intellectuals and artists with the Nazis (and Vichy government). How has this motivated you? How has this been perceived by critics, curators and museums in France?

SB: For historical reasons, my country had trouble doing its memory work. Just after the war, the leaders of France preferred to create a fable according to which all of France was in the resistance. Many local councils were not deNazified. Many French people denounced others. It was a letter of denunciation that provoked my mother’s arrest. Artists and intellectuals rewrote their CVs. Everything became hazy, buried in the unsaid. Vichy France under Petain took root in the extreme right and extremist Catholicism. Later, the Algerian War revived all of this and the French began to oscillate between arrogance and submission. I remember having decided to stage Figuren for personal reasons, but also because years before someone took me (despite the bans associated with it) to see the old anatomy institute at Strasbourg’s Civil Hospital. In the building’s cellars were body parts floating in tanks full of alcohol. The bodies had come from the concentration camps of Schirmeck and Struthof, where people had undergone medical experiments. I could never forget this moment. Perhaps those specimens are still there.

Art presented the same historical silence: in the ‘20s, the French art world was built on the theories of the extreme right, which are still the schemas we use today. This had consequences for the universities. To caricature a little, one could say that there was a kind of ‘war’ between a reactionary art – conservative, racial and pure – and a republican art. 1968 was not for nothing, but it only recovered this past by lacking the courage to analyse our own, present history! This artistic period before the war remains buried and that has not been without consequence for public collections and the ways we teach art in France.

JK: You say the Nazis won. What do you mean by this?

SB: I am not the only person to think that Nazi theories succeeded in convincing a large part of the world. They influenced ideas about bodily perfection, genetic manipulation, the rejection of alterity, the need to fabricate something beyond ourselves under the pretext of scientific progress. We rediscover these theories in the constant need to look alike through the same logos and brands. We find them in these desires for global homogenisation, where singularity is declared a danger. We find them in stadiums where people behave like a single, powerful and deified body… But it is especially the spectacular aesthetic staging of our own death that is most striking. Cinema is full of examples of this. Those who swear that the planet will always pull through, all the while unifying and destroying it, mistake themselves for gods, just like Hitler did.

JK: You have lived and worked in the Paris suburb of St-Denis for many years. Why there? Why at the edge of the city? Why with this community?

SB: I have always lived on the edge. In fact, I was born beside a national border. I am a little suspicious of centres. They are absorbent, overly calm, and often pretend to be static. When you’re on the margins or on the borderlines, you’re always asking who you are, and you are obliged to stay mobile and alert. I like movements of thought, the movements of the body. It was 25 years ago that I found in St-Denis, in the northern suburbs of Paris, a mixed and down-to-earth city that corresponded to my needs, on the margins of Paris.

JK: Why did you begin to work as a video artist? Why have you embraced an artistic process and form that moves between the strict discipline of film and the chaos and chance of cultural democracy?

SB: I stopped making installations and objects in 1991 following a public dispute – with the French artist Daniel Buren – on the question of the authoritarianism of a certain aspect of modernity that I found too white, too colonialist, too anti-woman and anti-gay. As a consequence, I devised a manifesto – “Disappointed, the bride redressed herself” (Déçue, la mariée se rhabilla) – and I decided to work only with people met in the four corners of the world, with whom I would share my artistic authority through the medium of video.

I never do any casting. I never come with predetermined work. I film on site. I like the idea of taking responsibility for everything that presents itself in front of my camera. I am thus obliged to set myself moving with and against my own limits, making myself fragile. You speak of my discipline of film. One can say that it is constraining. When people arrive, I do not say to them, “be comfortable, the camera will find you”. I place the camera in a frontal position, just in front of them and I explain its potency to them. Then I ask them to imagine, on the other side of the camera, a face that they will address. I stand beside them, just out of view. This constant constraint of the camera makes the improvised studio an ‘uninhabitable’ and difficult space. It is their resistance to the camera, through my questions and their address to the Other behind the camera that can sometimes open up a breach. The people I film always begin by playing the social role they give themselves. Like you and me, they have adapted to the rules of communication. But the constraints of the camera, the ambiguity of my questions and the extreme attention between us makes this conniving seduction fall away. When the people allow themselves to leave their role-playing, they become as fragile as glass and something seeps from them. They no longer play; they are. It is always a very short moment, like a breath, an extreme concentration of an interior time. I try in fact to shake up their unconscious ties to authority. These people thereby become unique and transform themselves. Neither they nor I come out of this unscathed, given how disturbing this brief instant is. When they look at the rushes, they do not recognise themselves, but take responsibility for this strangeness by giving me their OK to put the video together. They always say to me, “That’s not me!” All my videos are accumulations of “That’s not me!”

I like that their gazes interpolate us and speak to us. They are with us, but do not become one with us. They form an US where the I resists. My videos are like artistic catharses in the making of the self outside the field of authority. In this sense, you can see my Living Pictures as outside control, as subversive, and as not advancing categorisations or mimeticism but rather the fundamental identity of Being: our radical singularity. The fact that we cannot, in any way, be the same as the Other, in spite of the daily denial of this by advertising, which programs us in the role of characters who are targeted, uniform and falsely in charge of our lives.

A long time ago, I wrote this phrase: ‘I WE ARE’ (‘JE NOUS SOMMES’). For me, it was a possible point of departure for constructing an idea of community. The ‘I’ or the ‘Us’, by themselves, are not interesting. One can symbolically see the ‘I’ as capitalist and the ‘Us’ as communist. It is singularity that helps to curb the authoritarian will to make us all one. That is why I am detached from a certain aspect of Modernism that haunts art and which wanted to make us believe that, in the name of art, we were all one and the same.

Singularity is disturbing because it resists both the ‘totalisation’ of bodies and their surveillance. It is this coming and going between a singularity and an ‘us in common’ which allows us to envisage freedom as a multitude of liberties with communities in permanent re-composition, in movement that does not tend towards a single, homogenised body.

In the Living Pictures, when I assemble all these fragments I have filmed of people letting loose, a false fiction starts to take shape. Abandonment creates stories, stories of the world. Intimacy then takes another status: intimacy in the public dimension. Certain people can see obscenity in that – ‘obscene’ being off-screen or outside the scene – that is, outside the territory allocated by society. I, however, see liberty in that. But our education only envisages intimacy – beyond the intimate – in confession. I do not like either confession or sacrifice.

JK: You talk about how you primarily have an international career as opposed to a French career. What do you mean by this? How has this occurred? How does this affect your work?

SB: (Laughs) I see two types of artist in France: those who exhibit in France and do not really exhibit abroad, and those who exhibit abroad and do not really exhibit in France. I belong to the second category. That doesn’t affect my work; on the contrary, it may be what gives me such freedom!

JK: Finally, what is fulfilling for Sylvie Blocher?

SB: I don’t like the term ‘fulfilled’. Much of the world is ‘fulfilled’ by eating too much, buying too much, stuffing oneself with so many images as to no longer know what to think, while other parts of the world suffer lack.

JK: Thank you.

SB: (Laughs) In fact, I suppose you would like to ask me what makes me happy… Lots of things really…

December 2009

John Kirkman is the CEO of Penrith Performing & Visual Arts. He is a Sydney based Gallery Director and arts administrator, and has curated and coordinated a range of international exhibition, residency and performance programs (with particular focus on Japan, India and the Pacific).

Sylvie Blocher – Curriculum Vitae
Born France 1953
Lives and works Saint Denis, France

Selected Solo Exhibitions
2009
Urban Stories / South China, Nosbaum & Reding – Art Contemporain, Luxembourg

2007
Sylvie Blocher: New Works, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, USA
Wo / Men in Uniform, Dunlop Art Gallery, Regina, Canada

2003
Living Pictures and Other Human Voices, Casino Luxembourg. Luxembourg
Dignidad, Museum of Contemporary Art San Telmo, Buenos Aires, Argentina
10 minutes of freedom, Espace-Rencontre avec l’œuvre d’art, Coudekerque, France

2001
Three of Us, La Chaufferie, Strasbourg, France

2000
Are You a Masterpiece? Exploratorium, San Francisco, USA

1998
Living Pictures / Themselves, Art Gallery of York University, Toronto, Canada

1997
Le jugement de Pâris, Art & Public, Geneva, Switzerland
Gens de Calais, Le Channel, Calais, France

1996
Warum ist Barbie Blond?, Kunstraum Düsseldorf, Germany
Sylvie Blocher, Centre international d’art contemporain, Montréal, Canada

1995
She and Him, Crestet Centre d’Art, France
Nous, Le Fonds régional d’art contemporain Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Marseille, France
Living Pictures / L’annonce amoureuse, Festival du Cinéma, France
Living Pictures / À quel point puis-je te faire confiance?, Galerie Roger Pailhas/ Art Basel, Switzerland

1993
Mise à vue, Abbaye Saint-André, Centre d’art Contemporain, Meymac, France
Étang rompu, Centre d’art contemporain, Vassivière, France

1992
Le partage du secret, Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry – le Crédac, France
Sylvie Blocher, Carré d’Art-Musée d’art contemporain, Nîmes, France

1991
Déçue, la mariée se rhabilla, Galerie Roger Pailhas, Marseille, France
Hommage à Suzanne, French Cultural Center, Freiburg, Germany

Selected Group Exhibitions
2010
Biennale Cuvée 10: World Selection of Contemporay Art, OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria
Brave New World: From the perspective of Mudam Collection, Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg
Videoformes, 25th International Manifestation of New Media & Video Art, Clermont-Ferrand, France
Intimate, Musée de Beauvais, France

2009
The Spectacle of the Everyday, 10th Biennale de Lyon, France
elles@centrepompidou, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France
Pas nécessaire et pourtant indispensable, 1979-2009: 30 ans d’art contemporain à Meymac, Abbaye Saint André – Centre d’art contemporain, Meymac, France
Feeling, Art Channel Gallery, Beijing, China

2008
El amor que tal, Gallery Santa Fé, Bogota, Colombia
Stopover, SESC (The Social Service of Commerce), São Paulo, Brazil
Alter Ego: When relationships become forms, Chartreuse de Mélan – Pôle départemental d’art contemporain, France

2007
Airs de Paris, (with Campement Urbain), Centre Pompidou, Paris, France
The Screen-Eye or the New Image: 100 videos to rethink the world, Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg

2006
L’Amour, comment ca va?, La Villette, Paris, France
L’Inde dans tous les sens, Espace Louis Vuitton, Paris, France
La force de l’Art, Grand Palais, Paris, France
Stopover, Kunsthalle Fribourg Fri-Art, Switzerland
Black Paris, Iwalewa House,The Africa Centre, Bayreuth University, Germany

2005
NowHere Europe, Fondazione Adriano Olivetti, 51st Venice Biennale collateral event, Italy
BEYOND: an extraordinary space of experimentation for modernization, Second Guangzhou Triennial,
China
11th Indian Triennale, New Delhi, India

2004
Born in Europe, Martin Gropius Baü, Berlin, Germany
Novo Techno, Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, USA
Mirrorical Returns: Marcel Duchamp and 20th Century, National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan
Excessive, Dense, Speedy, Complex, Empty… But Humane, Argos Festival 2004, Brussels, Belgium
Nuits Blanches, Paris, France

2003
Z.O.U. – Zone of Urgency, Dreams and Conflicts – The Viewer’s Dictatorship, 50th Venice Biennale, Italy
Signatures of the Invisible, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, USA
VI Biennial of Video and New Media, Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago, Chile
Phantom der Lust: Visions of Masochism in Art, Neue Galerie Graz, Austria

2002
Sense of Wonder, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel
The Signatures of Invisible, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland
Power, Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg

2001
Luxembourg, les Luxembourgeois, Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Signatures of Invisible, London Institute, London, UK
Vidéoformes, 16th International Manifestation of New Media & Video Art, Clermont-Ferrand, France

2000
Look, 100 Years of Contemporary Art, Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels, Belgium
Sporting Life, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia
Leaving the Island, Pusan International Contemporary Art Festival, Pusan Metropolitan Museum of Art, Korea
Insistent Memory: The Architecture of Time in Video Installation, Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, Florida, USA
Micropolitiques, The Magasin – Centre national d’art contemporain, Grenoble, France
Faith: The Impact of Judeo-Christian Religion on Art at the Millennium, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut, USA

1999
Heaven, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany and Tate Liverpool, UK

1998
Gare de l’Est, Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain, Luxembourg

1997
Open October, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, USA
Crossings ’97: France-Hawaii, Honolulu Triennial, Hawaii

1996
Model Home: an idea for living, Clocktower Gallery/ P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, USA

1995
FemininMasculin: Le Sexe de L’ Art, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France
Puente de pasaje, Bilbao, Spain

1994
Rien que des Rencontres, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Antwerp, Belgium

1993
Été 93, Le Nouveau Musée, Villeurbanne, France

1992
French Window, Chisenhale Gallery, London and Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK
Through the viewfinder, de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam

1991
Individualités, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada

Performance
1999
If you can’t piss straight, make infiltration, Video Viewpoints, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA

Awards
2002. Community / Art / Collaboration Award to Campement Urbain, Evens Foundation
1995. Gold Medal, Alexandria Biennial, Alexandria, Egypt