Art News

“Les Marques Aveugles” on view at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genéve

GENEVA.- “La Jetée” (“The Jetty”, 1962) opens with a still image of Orly airport, followed by this sentence, almost as seminal as Chris Marker’s film itself: “This is the story of a man, marked by an image from his childhood”. LES MARQUES AVEUGLES takes Chris Marker’s film as a point of departure, and researches the notion of time and memory, and more specifically the relationship between image and mark, traces, traumatism. If these elements are clearly discernible in the story the film tells, they are equally so in the film’s aesthetics – violent contrasts, fragmented images, an impossible return to the past. The seventeen works of LES MARQUES AVEUGLES use various strategies to illustrate these issues, which make use, moreover, of formats as different as projection, slide show, play between still and moving images, performance and installation. If the image’s mark necessarily relates to memory and