EXPOSITION - NOUVELLES ACQUISITIONS PHOTOGRAPHIQUES 4

Exhibitions of works acquired from Françoise SAUR and Jin ROBARDET as part of the photographic year, presented in the Graphic Arts room.

Françoise Saur
Portfolio Le Re-Cueillir, 2002

Françoise Saur began her training in photography at the École Louis-Lumière (Paris), then continued at the Folkwangschule für Gestaltung (Essen, Germany) with Otto Steinert, founder and theorist of subjektive Fotografie. Guided by role models such as Dorothea Lange and Henri Cartier Bresson, she gradually oriented her lens towards sociological themes. Each time, she takes the time to immerse herself in the context, in order to capture the soul of the people and places involved. Her subjects range from the human figure to nature and its development through the seasons.

Her talent as a photographer was recognized early on, and several awards have marked her career. In 1978, she received a grant from the Fondation Nationale de la Photographie, and in 1979 the Prix Nièpce. In 2000, thanks to a grant from the French Ministry of Culture's Fonds d'incitation à la création (FIACRE-CNAP), she was able to undertake her ambitious three-year "Femmes de Gourara" series in Algeria. Her career has also been marked by several solo exhibitions, at La Chambre in Strasbourg (2016), the Musée d'art moderne et contemporain in Strasbourg (2021) and the Musée des beaux-arts in Mulhouse (2022), and by participation in various group shows organized at the Rencontre d'Arles (1983), the Musée d'art contemporain in Dunkirk (1990) and the Musée du Montparnasse in Paris (2010).

His works are held in several public collections (Fonds national d'art contemporain, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Cité Nationale de l'Histoire de l'Immigration, Musée d'Art Moderne, Strasbourg, Musée Nièpce, Châlon-sur-Saône...).

Le Re-cueillir is a series produced between 2001 and 2002 on the outskirts of her studio, in which Françoise Saur captures 34 snapshots of plant species: grasses, mosses, snow sedges, willowherbs, black thorns, foxgloves, horsetails, bilberries, ferns, lily of the valley and maple leaves. The 36x36 cm frame invites a close dialogue with the motif. The black and white tones accentuate the relief of these mountain territories. Placed end-to-end, these photographs reveal the artist's journey into the heart of nature, and the deep ties she maintains with it. Each shot reflects an encounter with a place and the artist's unique understanding of it. In her approach, Françoise Saur also takes into account the spatial layout of her works, for which she proposes a batch arrangement, although each image can also exist independently.

Jin Robardet
Portfolio dyxphori, 2024

Born in Nancy in 1980, Jin is an artist and curator. Trained at ENSAD - Nancy and after a two-year collaboration with Linköping University (Sweden), since the mid-2000s she has been developing a career in which installation and music play a central role. Well-versed in the digital arts, she has made the digital ghost and the paradoxical ephemerality of the Internet archive one of her research subjects. Working on the notion of conflict, from the intimate and personal to the armed, she employs a wide variety of media, combining them in complex systems. Each piece, whether a stand-alone object or a site-specific installation, is always part of a larger family or playlist, bringing together seemingly disparate creations that are always linked by a common thread, often spiritual and philosophical. As in an ongoing musical composition, his works are grouped together in albums, with their track lists, B-sides, remixes, samples...
Quotation, collage, detour and rearrangement are methods that Jin employs routinely, both in his artistic creation and in his curatorial practice. Most often creating according to the places she discovers, as a good urban explorer, and according to exhibition opportunities, Jin plays with the public's expectations by hiding her interventions from view, or by making her installations inaccessible, leaving only a digital vestige.

dyxphori exists first and foremost as a project visible only on the Internet, on the website of the Kunstraum Barthel gallery in Leipzig. This set of installations, created in an Art Deco building temporarily closed to the public, uses a variety of found and manufactured materials, such as a piano, clothes, railroad sleepers and so on. The narrative that weaves its way from one room to the next pays homage to fantastic genre films, from giallo to horror. The dyxphori atmosphere oscillates between darkness and grand-guignol, and a playful, theatrical spirit presides over the in situ arrangements. Make-up is used in most of the stagings as a colorful punctuation mark, both humorous and performative, reminding us of the corporality of the whole. Exploring unease and emotional discomfort, as the title suggests, alluding to the gender dysphoria experienced by transgender people, the project is resolutely queer.
Invited to exhibit her work during the photography season organized by the Musée des Beaux-arts in autumn-winter 2024-2025, which showcases the contemporary scene in the Grand Est region of France, Jin wanted to bring the dyxphori album into existence in the form of a portfolio, a precious object and case for all fantasies, which restores in physical form a discreet dialogue that has taken place and continues with the public as through electronic connections, e-mail exchanges, immediate and silent. The museum now wishes to include the final object in its collections by acquiring it.

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