"Rebecca Bournigault belongs to a generation of young artists for whom the issue of reality is a decisive factor in their approach. A reality that is rooted in the immediate, the presentday, the day- to- day, and the affective, where what is formulated tends to be adaptation arrangements rather than any desire for excess. They are happier with relational contents and concepts of socialization than with an aesthetics of the sublime and certain forms of formalist huffing and puffing. What is more, their work finds its way through networks where cultural infrastructures and private collaborations rub shoulders indiscriminately." (....)
"Rebecca Bournigault shifts the question of the other as subject, as permanence, towards a sequence of states and actions and ways of being , and she does so by presenting common places, places that are shared before being individualized." Excerpt from an article by Herve Thoby (Le Quartier)
In Rebecca Bournigault 's most recent video piece, "Sans titre, 18 novembre 1996", first shown at the ARC (City of Paris Museum of Modern Art), and again this summer at the Lyon Biennale, she has managed to give shape, in particular, to her desire to prompt the onlooker to square up physically to the work , and thus to her subject through the dimension of the work combined with the obligatory closeness of the screen. The public thus experiments with the boundary between interior and exterior, and the private/ public structure.
Photos and watercolours will be on view at the Almine Rech Gallery. Rebecca Bournigault replies thus to the question raised about the diversity of her activity, which compasses videos, photos and drawings:
"First and foremost, there is the content , what I want to do or what I need to give shape to. The form comes later. I am not particulary interested in video, or in photography. The tool is really just a tool. The video camera is a tool. Editing doesn't interest me, for example. But it is always very precise. I have got this digital machine but I am not fascinated by the object itself, to the point where I always have it with me. I put it away and, at a given moment, when I have to take a photo, I take it and then I go and get the machine, , or rather the tool. The one thing it mustn't do is contradict what I am going to say. There is a proper medium for this kind of thing, So, I will use it."
Rebecca Bournigault says of a recent series of photos that they are "images of a film that doesn't exist, that is, in fact, the film of my life. These images are split - seconds in a life, moments that there is no trace of."
