For its first participation in Paris Photo, 110 Gallery is pleased to present the work of French visual artist Sara Imloul. For Curiosa 2022, the artist proposes a selection from her series Das Schloss composed of 11 photographs (calotypes), 5 of which are brand new, alongside a video made exclusively for the fair. The installation gives shape to the Schloss, Sara Imloul’s family home in Lorraine, a private retreat, where the artist captures photographs of her relatives and ancestors.
In order to better tell the story of this place, reflected in its small traces and details, she uses her large format camera to capture intimate sketches of her models as a «family constellations», a term borrowed from group therapy, intended to resolve family conflicts by having its subjects exchange roles. For this autobiographic body of work, created over a one year period in 2014 and taken up again in 2022, Imloul staged and captured the spirits inhabiting this special place using her camera. The main protagonist of the exhibition is the artist’s grandfather, teetering on the edge between two worlds. Like in an expressionist film, the artist has him sit for her in symbolic compositions, encapsulating his memories, suspending time.
“I compose elements on my ‘canvases’, drawings, collages, as symbols, like letters of an alphabet for the viewer to decipher,” Imloul explains. «Him. Father. Daddy. The Patriarch. The one who seems to have always been there, who seems to be a part of this place, who is the place itself. He can venture into the Schloss at night, he has no need for light: its map is engraved under his eyelid, the outline of the walls and the steps anchored under the sole of his shoe. He has never been afraid of noises, creaks and rattles. He is one of those reassuring elders. Someone you would call to kill a spider in the bathtub or to get rid of the mice… But also to scare away ghosts by his presence alone, since he didn’t believe in them. Yet over the last few months, he began seeing them…»
Sara Imloul. 2014
Meet us November 10th-13th at the Grand Palais Ephémère, 7 Pl Joffre, Paris VII, booth SC13, Curiosa section