Aurélie Blanchette Dubois

Photos : Beatriz Pereira

Who Framed Perpetual Bliss ? at Mala, 30.04.21 - 19.06.21

The exhibition brings together the film What Exceeds (2020) and a series of textile sculptures, Conforama Balling (2021) and Meltdown Birthing (2021), produced specifically for Mala’s exhibition space.

What Exceeds is a short fiction film shown on a vertical screen where is observed a group of young adults operating a shift in their existential quest – a sort of strategic withdrawal that consist of acting in a simulacrum of professionalism. Recognizing the inherent demands of power and negotiation dynamics to defend themselves or to exercise any form of resistance, they create their community and engage in an electrical wiring practice. Flirting with the aesthetic codes of the fashion and music industry, the video and the sculptures evoke the impression of a schizophrenic state between sincerity and cynicism as the simultaneous imperatives of mainstream popular culture.

The installation of the textile pieces together with the hanging lights fixtures expand the imaginary of the film into materials. Made from a digital collage of stock images and fictitious newspaper clips printed on mesh fabric, the curtain and the soft balls scattered in the space are reminiscent of a showroom or a vacant playground. The pattern combines images of body parts with others of sewers, spilling canales and garden hoses arranged in ornamental compositions. There is a tone of nostalgia to the fashion and ideological trend displayed in the objects, a suggestion of a bygone era of future-oriented interior decoration as a class achievement.