Exhibition: Gaëlle Choisne – Temple of Love – To Hide

Gaëlle Choisne "Temple of Love – To Hide"

As part of the Artist in Residence Programme of KfW Stiftung in cooperation with Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, scholarship holder Gaëlle Choisne (*1985, France/Haiti) presents her works

Presented at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Temple of Love – To Hide is a new phase of Temple of Love – a long-term project aiming at a global reunification of the living through the concept of love. This exhibition, freely inspired by the chapter “To Hide” in Roland Barthes’s Fragments of a lover’s discourse, is resolutely oriented towards self-reconstruction through the sharing of experience, connection to one’s ancestors, respect for heritage, and inner corporal harmony.

Accumulation primitive (2019–2022) is a movie, the first images of which were recorded in 2017– the interview of Madame Café, a blind, Haitian voodoo priestess whose ability to heal children earned her the title “docteur-feuille” – leaf doctor in English. Gaëlle Choisne took these images as the starting point of a wider project of interviews with feminine and transfeminine people, investigating their condition as racialized women in contemporary societies. Among these figures are artist and producer Christelle Oyiri, or even Choisne’s mother, Marie-Carmen Brouard.

Gaëlle Choisne’s Accumulation primitive is a truly kaleidoscopic series of portraits, inspired by Silvia Federici’s essay Caliban and the witch (2017). It presents itself as a pocket of resistance composed of women who have developed the ability to “heal” through diverse media and disciplines: creation of communities, family caring, music, “alternative” medicine...These women are imagining “side paths” in reaction to the “primitive accumulation” of capital as theorized by Karl Marx in The Capital – one of the many exogenous effects on racialized people being dispossession of their true being and free will.

A long-term video production, Accumulation primitive is part of a wider installation, in which it mirrors another work considered by the artist as its doppelganger: Primitive Amnesia (2019-2022). The movie mixes a selection of found footage videos of women’s protests in France, Brazil or Haiti, with close-up shots of flowers recorded by the artist in Normandy during the lockdown.

The installation, presented for the first time at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, presents itself as a safe space imagined for self-care, and caring for others. One is invited to drink soothing concoctions, or to receive healing energy...Beyond the two videos, the visitor is invited to rest on Lie close to your ancestors (2022), a monumental carpet woven by women in the Berber mountains, on which Choisne has pinned small portraits of inspirational figures. In another room, the video Ahuehuete 11111 (2022) introduces the visitor to a bimillennial tree planted in Santa Maria de Tule in Mexico, filled with an incredible energetic and vibratory force.