Frac Île-de-France is presenting the first solo exhibition in France by Haris Epaminonda at le plateau.

The work of the Cyprus-born artist, who currently lives and works in Berlin, comprises mainly films, sculptures and installations that incorporate images and objects borrowed from various origins and epochs, to stage multiple encounters, while cultivating an explicit relationship with the past.

Epaminonda’s approach is characterised by a careful choice of objects and meticulous presentations. The fact that her exhibits are taken from contexts that can be inferred by the observer, but are never explicitly revealed, contributes to their intrinsic strangeness. Pages of old books, vases or statuettes are put into relation through visual associations and form a fictional space. Shown as they are – as readymades, essentially – they appear like elements of an interrupted narrative that spectators are encouraged to reconnect. Their mode of presentation, or exposition, is key, and although they are often displayed in conventional museum settings – plinths, display cases, etc. – the scenography is invariably revisited and altered, as the plinths become sculptures, the display cases turn into aquariums, or frames overlap with more frames to focus on a detail of an image.

Epaminonda’s films, as in her series Chronicles (2010 – on-going) evidence a similar relationship to the world: scenes of still-lives of objects and images variably composed and recomposed in front of coloured backdrops resulting in takes reminiscent of archaeological documentation –, landscapes vibrating to the rhythm of the elements moving through them; a palm tree moving with the wind, clouds passing over a mountain top, the sun setting at the horizon of the sea - reaffirm the poetic vision that underpins the artist’s work.

The exhibition at le plateau marks an important and new step in Epaminonda’s practice, which, as the title suggests, shall be seen as one large work building up over time through different volumes and chapters. For this occasion the artist has devised an extensive environment that occupies the cleared spaces of le plateau with a series of cubicles, platforms and screens conceived both as sculptures and presentation devices. Including other elements, films and sound - the soundscapes of the installation will be composed by the music duo ‘Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides’, with whom the artist often collaborated in the past - , the whole set exceeds the exhibition space itself with parallel and temporary appearances connecting the inside and outside of le plateau. Like an emphatic homage to the Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, these performed interventions shape a kind of inhabited archipelago in constant evolution.

By condensing the different angles of her approach, in which the idea of travelling and movement – in time and space – plays a fundamental role, the exhibition as a whole will offer a unique opportunity for a simultaneously sculptural, spatial and filmic experience.

Born in 1980 in Cyprus (Nicosia), Haris Epaminonda lives and works in Berlin. Her work was exhibited in solo exhibitions in numerous international art venues : Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011) ; Schirn Kunsthalle, Franckfort (2011) ; Tate Modern, Londres (2010) ; Malmö Konsthall (2009). Corepresenting Cyprus at the Venice Art Biennale in 2007, she took part to dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012), to the 2nd Athens Biennale (2009) and to the 5th Berlin Biennale (2008).