Collaboration with artist Karin Ruggaber, this joint exhibition unfolds within the unique temporality of balance and transition surrounding the winter solstice, and is presented to the public both in natural daylight and under the glow of industrial fluorescent tubes illuminating the walls at night (open from 4 pm to 8 pm, two hours of daylight and two of darkness).

In an ambiguous black and white, the exhibition explores the boundary between nothingness and visibility, movement and crystallization, technology and the immutable, drawing inspiration from the atmosphere and space of the sacristy of the former Cordeliers Convent, with references to ancestral remnants and symbolic traces such as the Stations of the Cross.

Karin Ruggaber’s flash photographs explore the boundary between light and darkness, revealing a moment of visibility through the erasure (disintegration) of the image. They express the dilemma of being seen and not being seen, the impossibility of seeing oneself, the iPhone’s technology in its quest for the inner self. Light becomes both metaphor and substance; the figure seems to hold the light, igniting a spark, evoking saints and ghosts within the broader context and mythology of the place. These images are experiments with unpredictable results; the precise moment of capture became elusive.

Gilles Conan ‘sacralizes’ a motorized stage projector by positioning it on a pedestal. It activates in a ceremonial of movements that are both mechanical and fluid, like a robotic whirling dervish leading interwoven trances throughout the exhibition. It is no longer the animated light, most often subtracted, that is at play, but the object itself, which becomes the artwork.

On the ground, Fresnel lenses from spotlights are randomly distributed, as when they were used for the ephemeral light dispersion installation on the facades of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Bregenz (Austria) in 2006. They reflect subtle light effects back to those moving through the exhibition space. As is often the case, the artist reuses materials, shifts and superimposes contexts, here again by subtraction.