Faye Mullen

Installation

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Chamber music; twenty-three dwellings, twelve months, solo for one body. La chute features an obsessive ritual illustrating the moment when a body meets the ground. Daily, for the duration of a whole year, a practice in falling was set in search to apprehend the material, weighty, physical, sculptural quality of the body. Routinely, submitted to its gravitational pull, the body of the artist fell from a height of 1.7m – her own height. The audio, without the image, was recorded of that body falling, failing and falling anew, such a journal perceptible solely by sound. In this performance, the body is made visible, all the while regressing into a figuration of its own abstraction – mass, movement, sound. “Inserting thanato to the more familiar bio, to address narratives in which authors write about their own death. Mullen performs, instead of writes, her autothanatography.” Announcing such a disappearance becomes, here, a means of appearing. “In a compellingly somber ritual, the artist’s presence suggests a desire for continuance, for longevity and legacy, while in the act of disappearance.” This installation traces the trajectory of a woman’s body from visible to invisible, from audibility to silence, and back. The body alone falls… An incredible willpower is necessary when you are falling to reside in your body. “Michaux hints that this willpower, however incredible, can reside and thus constitute a kind of recourse. Faye Mullen is seeking out this recourse, multiplying approaches to it in her experiments, knowing that it is not there to reside, though it must be evoked with art” Jim Drobnick and Jennifer Fisher. Lisa Visser, Henri Michaux, Daniel Dobbels. Faye Mullen.

Faye Mullen

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Production

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Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing

Acknowledgments

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Merci à Est-Nord-Est et Culturia résidences d’artistes, François Bonenfant, Alain Fleischer, Matthieu Orléan, Jean-Claude Brisseau, Eric Prigent, Madeleine Van Doren, Daniel Dobbels, Pierre Delattre, Jacky Lautem, Richard Campagne, Estelle Benazet, Blandine, Jean-René, Olivier, Aurélie, Baptiste, Charles, Cyprien, Sébastien et toute l’équipe au Fresnoy ; ma famille, Coralie, Kate, Gabriel, Thibaud, Guillaume, Raphaël, Yasmina et Stefan.