THE POWER OF THE LIVING BEYOND MODERNISM

On the occasion of its thirtieth anniversary, the MAMC+ hosts the artist, photographer, and videographer Valérie Jouve, who was born in the region, for her first exhibition in Saint-Étienne.
She presents a film and photographs of places (houses, facades, buildings) and living organisms (trees, people).

Life Forms is a conversation between the artist and her native region, a mining basin characterised by the construction of housing estates. It takes photographs created between 1987 and 1991 in Saint-Étienne as its point of departure, which it brings into contact with images deriving from other territories, taken throughout her career. Her latest works gradually move away from the city, coming closer to the rural milieu and to nature. Valérie Jouve’s images show the worlds that have remained, the living elements that have resisted in spite of modernisation.

The exhibition is designed like a musical score: the photographs of varying dimensions are hung in juxtaposition or superposition, at different heights. These untitled artworks can be freely interpreted. The stories told in these images belong to the spectator.

Curator

Martine Dancer-Mourès
Chief curator, in charge of the 30th anniversary programme of the MAMC+

CATALOGUE

Valérie Jouve, Formes de vies
Texts by Jean-Christophe Bailly, Martine Dancer-Mourès, Valérie Jouve and Philippe Roux. Bilingual: French and English. Fage publishing house. ISBN 9782849755112. 118 pages. Price: 25 euros.

‘The walls bear the traces of the people who have lived in these places.’
Valérie Jouve, 2018

OVER 70 PHOTOS

FROM 1987 TO TODAY

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