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Emese Miskolczi, Presences

  • Présences

    © Emese Miskolczi

For several years, EmeseMiskolczi has been building up a corpus that mixes photography and video. Each subject she tackles generates a methodology in several steps. The artist observes a situation that she documents exhaustively. She then transcribes this documentation again intuitively and contemplatively. In her video shows and her long-exposure photographs, time becomes a matter that she divides up, stretches, dissects and manipulates. Thus, she endeavours to open new perceptive horizons on a reality that we think we know.

With the support of the EspacePhotographique Arthur Batut, Emese Miskolczi asked a hundred and forty- eight inhabitants of Labruguière if she could film them and create group portraits from their individual features. Shopkeepers, rugby players, nursing auxiliaries, fishermen, men and women from the Seniors Club, children from a pre-school class were therefore filmed. Each time, the artist asked them to say a presentation sentence chosen for the whole group while staring at the camera . The series covers a prism of activity that she wanted to be as broad as possible. It also extends to the different ages in life: the youngest models are four years old and the oldest are retired.

Here the social portrait does not come from the juxtaposition of its members but rather from the digital superimposition of their physical appearance. Superimposed, synchronised in their movements, these portraits talk, breathe and wink like one single person. The face that emerges from their blending is a purely virtual image. It is the visual and condensed formula of all the people that gave it its features.

A hundred and forty- eight portraits are just about enough to significantly approach the different faces of Labruguière, penetrate its substance and its common features.  But although it is very condensed, this formula remains faltering. Shown on a loop, its appearance and metamorphoses evolve at a speed that our eyes struggle to follow.  The prolonged staring of these portraits generates a multiplicity of subliminal images through the friction of their moving matter. By inviting the eye to be on the look-outEmeseMiskolczi suggests that the effects are a decoy. She does not decide the final appearence of these images but rather she builds the device that brings them out.

The loop editing is to time what superimposition is to space: an attempt to extract a truth held into the memorial traces of matter, by dint of repetition. None of the models who posed for these portraits will recognise themselves because no one can control their facial expressions or perceive them. It is this precise discrepancy between a face and the image of that face that EmeseMiskolczi explores through ways of resemblance. The images that she composes are the unsettling manifestation of an elusive part of the searched for identity between the singular and the general, right in the middle between the individual and the collective.

The emotion felt when seeing these bodies vibrating in unison is probably akin to a form of sublimation that can be found in dramatic or musical choirs. The strength of common speech (or image) lies in the fact that it lets its unity, dispersion or diversity be heard equally. The composite portraits made by EmeseMiskolczi are a visual equivalent to polyphony: a combination of several independent voices linked by the laws of harmony.

Marguerite Pilven

For the catalog Presence, an exhibition I have curated for Espace Photographique Arthur Batut, (Labruguière, France) from 13th of decembre 2013 to 14th of February 2014