For Liverpool Biennial 2012, Sylvie Blocher presented a spectacular five screen video installation spanning across a darkened space in the Cunard Building. The Series: Speeches, intervenes with seminal political speeches and utopian manifestos, using a variety of performers who freely and originally reenact the selected texts, according to their own artistic sensitivities.
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For instance, the 1948 Communist manifesto, written by Marx and Engels, is transformed in a rap poem by Katia Boutchaeva (a Russian Slam artist currently with an expulsion order from France), whilst singer David Bichindaritz sings Barak Obama’s speech A More Perfect Union as it were a melodic ballad. These voices stand in front of politically charged backdrop patterns repeating key political and social symbols including falling dollar bills, Mickey Mouse dolls, flags and guns, as they recite this series of unfulfilled promises, that have differently informed our collective hope for a better and more just world.
Sylvie Blocher is one of France’s most outstanding multimedia artists and produces video and film installation pieces which explore the concepts of otherness, representation and art’s political responsibility. Sylvie Blocher’s work encourages different ways of viewing and understanding the world. In 1995 the Pompidou Centre held a major exhibition of her work and she has since exhibited at the Venice Biennale, and at galleries in Canada and the USA. She has recently been part of the group show Heaven at the Tate Gallery in Liverpool.
Sylvie Blocher at Liverpool Biennial 2012
The Series: Speeches, 2012
Video installation
Exhibited at The Cunard Building