Jeu de Paume

Ydessa Hendeles' exhibition entitled "The living and the Artificial" (consisting of works of art all comprising a photograph of living persons in the company of one or several teddy bears) had puzzled Agnès Varda so much that she decided to go to Toronto where the artist lives and interview her. In front of Agnes Varda's DV camera, Ydessa tells about the singularity of her artistic approach. She also expresses herself about the Holocaust, which both her parents survived.

The main protagonist of the film is a tortoise; an ancient animal that embodies Cura, the Roman goddess of care, voiced by American vocalist Joan La Barbara. The setting is Richard and Dion Neutra's VDL Research House II in Los Angeles. Architect Neutra carefully designed his projects to elicit human sensory and emotional responses.

The film No Shooting Stars by Basim Magdy is built around the personal narrative of an unidentified inhabitant of the ocean space, a territory that lays dormant on the margins of our awareness and does not enter history books. Dream-like scenes drift in dissonance with a narration that has no beginning or end. It unfolds like a poem that is affected by the ocean’s secrets but offers no explanation about who is living under the water’s surface, instead meandering through loops of imagination. The image of who exactly the narrator is slips away as soon as it takes shape, reflecting the logic of the unstable grounds of water space.

In Sange Khara, commissioned by Fundação Bienal de São Paulo for the 36th Bienal, Laila Hida offers a landscape where memory is not narrated, but circled – tentatively, tenderly, with the gravity of something sacred and half-forgotten. The project stages a kind of poetic inquiry where images seem to emerge from a re-constructed memory anchored by a 16mm film and expanded through an immersive installation. Characters cross paths, brought together through a tapestry of iconographic and cinematic references: the young woman from The Wanderers of the Desert (1984), the couple in The Sheltering Sky (1990). Two young guys ride their bikes and strike poses on a dirt road as if freshly cast in a rap video summoning an apparition, a construct of a landscape, the desert, the oasis, and the people who inhabit them, filtered through cinema and image.

There is a city in the South of Morocco, named Ouarzazate. It's very unlikely that you've been there, however, you've surely seen it before.