Éveillée

Melanie Matranga was born in 1985 in Marseille. She graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris in 2011. In 2014, she was awarded the Frieze Artist Award and was nominated for the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard prize in the same year, as well as the Aware prize in 2018. She is represented by the galleries High Art (Paris, Arles, FR) and Karma International (Zurich, CH). Her work, which combines installations, sculptures, and films, has been the subject of several solo shows, notably at the Palais de Tokyo (2015), Villa Vassiliev (2018), and in her French and Swiss galleries. She uses language as a witness, approaching it through appropriations (personal narratives, pieces of music…) or direct messages integrated into her works. Her relationship to space, altered through a sensitive apprehension of its architecture or luminous perception, disturbs the visit and enhances the dreamlike sensation of the exhibition Éveillée.

You enter the house, and on the left, you can plunge. First into the uncomfortable and dark cotton, then into the waves of a wild coast.

However, the surrounding sounds reveal a great calm. Perhaps it is white noise. Voices, from which rebellion is never far away. The violence within us is tinged with love, tinged with desire, frustration, possibilities. You can open one eye and quickly close it, out of modesty.

Ahead, there are doors. What does the back of the threshold hold? The halo that perspires and emerges doesn’t tell us much. We can lend an ear and close it again, out of modesty.

Maybe you’re in a movie, maybe you’re in a half-sleep, in that suspended moment just before the alarm rings. Perhaps it is also the day that reveals the strange sensation of these inner changes that make everything seem different.