synergies malicieuses!

Julia Buruleva

Performance and improvisation. Staging the naked body as a particle of the aesthetic world.  

The main object of Julia’s projects is the naked body, her own or someone else’s. She considers the naked body as the most important element of the aesthetic world. She considers the naked body as the smallest particle of the aesthetic world, a basic element of it. 

Her approach is always to combine photography and performance, creating a context for improvisation. She creates a possibility for something unexpected, something special to emerge. The way she plays with sets, objects, models and light gives the viewer a sense of surrealism. She stages psychedelic photographs with a surprisingly dense atmosphere that capture a world of beauty and mystery.

“color therapy”

Julia Buruleva made this series through photo performance, one of her favorite ways to create: she invites anonymous participants for a shoot. She doesn’t know beforehand how many will come, their appearance, their personality or how they will interact with each other. She just offers some main visual theme and then lets models improvise.

Things happen freely during the shoot. She doesn’t have any final image in her mind.

“selfie Isolation”

One of Julia Buruleva’s most interesting projects of her photo performances.

It is a series of self portraits made in her flat at quarantine during pandemic of covid-19.

It’s a “photo performance” where both parts are equally important and complement each other. 

She used only a piece of white wall in her flat and elements she could find at home, to create her own surrealistic theatre.

“Katerina loves to dream”

It’s a metaphorical series about people who are “naked” and vulnerable in front of circumstances and trying to protect their minds by dreams.

A lot of people spend their whole life in dreams, never looking to reality

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Gopal Dagnogo 

“La Ronde érotique”

Gopal Dagnogo emancipates himself from the constraints of the sublime and disrupts its codes to illustrate and magnify irony. In its installation “La Ronde érotique” he transforms the ordinary into a sacred moment, a game engaged by the artist. All the drawings are choreographies fixed on tracing paper, revealing the poetry of the ordinary, both opaque and intelligible. 

As if to break a chain of industrial production, the work takes the time to laugh, a bitter understanding of today’s society. Slaughterhouses and other meat factories are transformed into a cabaret where the noisy, naked crowd of poultry comes to life in a frenzied jamboree. Through its straightforward narration, the round blurs the reference points of time and space. Its humour becomes disturbing and curious eyes wonder… 

“Thus, this Ronde Erotique series deploys on dozens of sheets of paper aerial poultry, dancers on pointe shoes, light and graceful. The pink background adds joy to the multiplication of the pattern that drags us into its dance. Yet here, there is no living thing. The chickens are plucked, their throats slit, hanging by their legs.

The feeling of cheerfulness fades as soon as we understand the subterfuge of the initial model found in a slaughterhouse. A direct reference to the medieval dance of death, this saraband underlines the vanity of social distinctions, which fate mocks, inviting us to think about our condition. Drawing on the concerns of a society in crisis, which he transcends through his imagination and his art, Gopal offers us here a reflection on life and death and brilliantly seizes upon a theme that has crossed eras and styles.”

Charlotte Lidon, PIASA Co-Director, Africa + Modern and Contemporary Art.