A video about fundamental aspects of the photographic image, which questions the way the body is usually represented.

At Sala Beckett, we present an installation by Laurent Goldring, a visual artist whose work focuses on and questions the characteristics of photography and video as media. In his studio, Laurent films bodies and groups of bodies (almost) every day, and through this process he questions a particular history of representation. On one hand this produces images, and, on the other, the creation of new bodies that are in turn constructed to resemble the images. The artist used to call this inversion of the process of similarity bodymade, but he no longer uses this word because of its ambiguity. 

Laurent Goldring shows us his images through four projections. Each image represents a (naked) body in motion, in an absence of space. The posture, movements and lack of intention blur the connotations and meanings of the body: each image is a kind of proof that the de-construction of full representations of the human figure calls into question imposed identities.

The images respond to each other and prove that the often-stated hypothesis that representation has been exhausted doesn't hold up; that we still don't know what the body can be or what the gaze is still to see; they also prove that if a body forms, it can dissolve into formlessness and then unform itself once more, that the dismemberment is endless.

In an interview published in Baltasar magazine, the artist explains his working method: The screen isn't a mediator; it is the image making itself, the workspace, the surface to be marked. At the start of a filming session I look at the body I'm filming and at the result on the screen simultaneously. Little by little, as things find their place, my gaze concentrates on the screen. I address the screen and my instructions are directed at it. If I address the body, it's as a delegate of the image, as a mediator.  Without this mechanism, there would not be any true discovery or construction.