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Lifelines

11.06.2023 - 12.01.2023
9 days ago

 

Lifelines is an exploration of what binds us. It weaves life-long projects, decennial performances, and infinite series to (re)consider how we perceive and therefore relate to others who share the same planet with us?as well as that planet itself.

How many lives do we brush against daily, and how do we acknowledge them? Two year-long performances attempt to answer this question. Tallying data on her hands, the artist calculated that she acknowledged 17% of the people she came across (2008?2009); and touched 33% of the people she talked to (2018?2019).

What of the lives we?ll never encounter directly? Entangled in multifold layers of distance, silence, bias, translation, and (mis)representation, the lines get fuzzy. As in the ceaselessly self-revealing exercise of drawing the world blindfolded (Blind Man?s Bluff), where it is what?s missing between the lines that say the most about us.

Embracing that everything is subjective, A Brief Introduction to the World has the mission of reading one autobiography per country in the world. A chalked map sketches out the world ?read? by the artist to this day, one story?or one person?s bias? at a time.

With White Flags, the artist wonders about the stories that conflict with each other, in battles of narratives and false equivalences. Each ?unequation? corresponds to a real-life exchange of life, in the form of prisoner exchanges. Each piece is handwoven on a loom for which, incidentally, the Romanian word (?r?zboi?) translates to ?war?. A wall of research punctuates the room, to further thread the series to both age-old and most recently violently revived debates about how we value human life.

Without conviction nor convincing, the artist only hopes to remind us that what makes us human is our very capacity to hold conflicting thoughts, to change our minds, to see the in-betweens, to value the unresolved, and to love all the gradients. Just like Antarctica, The White Continent, which holds the most beautiful lessons of all, as it turned out to not be so white at all.

Misunderstood, misspelled and misrepresented, Antarctica has no permanent inhabitants to tell its own story. Yet it is, in its own way, one of the planet?s most vital and vocal voices today, since the 5.4 million square mile-continent has such a primordial role on the Earth?s ecological equilibrium. Using one of NASA?s most detailed compiled images of the continent, the Antarctika series translates pixels to embroidery stitches, compensating for its lack of representation with time and meticulous attention.

In a final readymade exercise, the ongoing project Tossed collects all the coins found by the artist onthe ground. Transformed into a walking calendar, they suggest that value is a matter of perspective and that the power to turn discarded change into sculptures, polished and painted by time and weather, is held within our perception. How we therefore define value, whether it?s time, money, nature, or life itself, and draw the lines about how those drive us, might just be a matter of interpretation?and therefore choic ?entirely.

Capucine Gros is a Swiss-born, French artist based in Bucharest, Romania. She received her BFA in Painting and New Media Art from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2012. Capucine splits her time between her own performance-based and geography- focused practice and other collaborative projects such as the UNFINISHED Festival in Bucharest. She has completed residencies around the world, from the Swatch Art Peace Hotel Residency in Shanghai to the Jalovik Art Colony in Serbia and the CTG Collective in Zimbabwe. She had her first major gallery exhibitions in New York City in 2017 at Catinca Tabacaru Gallery and in Paris in 2022 at Galerie Jean- Kenta Gauthier, both of whom now also represent her, and her first museum solo exhibition at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah in 2019.