Pierre Bismuth

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Pierre Bismuth (b. 1963) is a french artist. In 2005 he won the best original screenplay at the 77th Academy Awards along to Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman for the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

He uses his artistic practice as a tool to examine our perception of reality, especially regarding our relation to cultural productions. With limited means and a lot of humour he aims at destabilising pre-established codes of perception and to push the viewer to develop critical ideas when presented with cultural objects whose meaning seems obvious. He holds the view that it is by creating unexpected shifts in the everyday meaning of things that lead to changes in perceptive habits.

For instance, 'Prevention of technical malfunction' (unplugged Bruce NAUMAN video work) comes down to the presentation of an unplugged video of the American artist.

'Some things less, some things more' consists of three thin partitions that were pierced with circles until as little material as possible remained, while the circles removed from the partitions accumulate on the floor.

The installation 'Some things less, some things more' was completed by two new editions of the series 'From red to nothing' and 'From green to something else'. Every new edition of the series reproduces the colour of a preceding exhibition only with a hardly visible modification and a slight addition of white in 'From red to nothing' and of colour in 'From green to something else'. It is only by keeping track with the exhibitions that this evolution becomes apparent, in one aspect intended to end with white but virtually unfinished in the other.

The new series 'Replace by the same' plays on the idea of substituting one thing by its double: in each of the pictures which have no thematical connection, elements taken from duplicates are glued on at the exact same place as they were on the originals.

'Foldings' consist of origami made out of different materials (magazines, newspapers, posters, maps, etc). The origami is then showed unfolded, bearing only the trace of its folding. Nevrtheless, each piece keeps the name of what it was as an origami.

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