Sarah-Anaïs Desbenoit
Night Stalker - Installation - 2023
présentée dans le cadre de l'exposition Panorama 25
Installation
Night Stalker is a polymorphous environment that invites spectators to enter a meditative state through an evol- ving visual and sound landscape. The animated sculptures that make up this landscape are all micro-fictions, cinematographic projections interspersed with games of miniatures, video, projections and sounds.
The ensemble creates a mental construction out of real places, each form soliciting our perception the better to summon our cognitive memory. Through a purely aesthetic language, each sculpture is capable of transmitting a state tinged with a certain melancholy, leading us into a dreamlike and melodic wandering.
This project was carried out in collaboration with two other artists : the composer Octave Magescas, who conceived the sound environment, and Guillaume Stagnaro, who worked on the conception of the various electronic devices whereby the landscape comes to life.
Sarah-Anaïs Desbenoit
Born in Paris, Sarah-Anaïs Desbenoit graduated from the École nationale supérieure d'arts de Paris-Cergy in 2020 before joining Le Fresnoy -- Studio national des arts contemporains in Tourcoing. Underpinned by long-term research -- pursued in particular during a residency at the Tighmert Oasis in the Moroccan desert and an internship at Villa Kujoyama in Japan --, her work focuses on the mechanisms of appearance and disappearance of images and their impact on memory and cognition. Through the creation of miniatures, but also through the use of video, projection and sound, her practice develops around the question of illusion and sublimated disorder. Inducing a meditative slowing down, her visual and aural installations are conceived as liminal places where several layers of reality are superimposed. In 2022, she made Phalène, a short film shot in 16 mm, which plunges us into a tale composed of a succession of tableaux vivants in which twin sisters go through a mystical experience. The film was selected for the Ammodo Tiger Short Competition at the IFFR in Rotterdam (world premiere). Parallel to her artistic practice, Sarah-Anaïs is also an editor/grader/ camera operator and assistant director. She also directs video clips for emerging musicians and assists various artists in audiovisual production for museums and for haute couture brands.
