Press release
Dressed in a suit and tie, “L’homme sans tête” or “The Headless Man” by Marie Aerts is a generic being with human aspects but whose physionomy itself questions the character. Proto-human or extra-terrestrial, this recurrent figure in the multimedia work of the artist is a being with no past and no future, with no thinking and no desire, thus a being that can be manipulated.
“L’homme sans tête” came to the artist’s mind from the book entitled “Mille Plateaux” by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatari, and refers to the concept of a “corpse without organs”. The figure is thus born from a utopian ideal to escape from the deviations of power in our contemporary societies. It is a way to question identity, loss of introverted thinking, uniformity, order and socialization mechanisms.
Placed in an undefined space and time, “L’homme sans tête” and his clones look like automatons, ready to obey any request from an invisible power- which may bring to mind the universe described by George Orwell in his classic, “1984”.
In the first part of Marie Aerts’s presentation by Galerie Dix9, the exhibition entitled “Debarquement” focuses on her video made in 2011, and on drawings of the story-board of her new project called “Uchronie 1 or the Domino Effect”.
The video “Debarquement 3” takes place on a beach in Normandy. An army of men without heads is stubbornly walking in an undefined order while a slow speed music evokes the heroic battle. This army of fragile characters appears to be going quietly to a conquest of the world.
As any remake, “Debarquement 3” unveils that aspect of memory: a schizophrenic reality where the story can be repeated with no end.