Catalogue > At random

At night, workers dig the sand in a pit. At dawn, around them, immense towers of a futuristic city raise themselves. Gradually human activities slow down, details appear, stones get loose, the sand pours, grounds disintegrate. Fragile on its bases, the city seems to be in a paradoxical time of destruction and construction, a future ruin aimed to come to an end. Achrone, invariant adjective stemming from physics and from medicine, indicates a region which it is impossible to observe a precise temporality. Shot and photographed in 2008 in the construction sites of the city of Dubai to echo the diurnal and night-working cycles of the workers, Achrone develops an abstract reorganization from the balance of power between architecture and nature.

Cécile Hartmann was born in Colmar in 1971, and works ad lives in Paris. After studies at the Beaux-Arts of Paris and at the University of Human Sciences of Strasbourg, Cécile Hartmann develops a work between contemporary art and cinema. In a pictorial and political prospect, mingling post-minimalist aesthetic with documentary dimension, her films explore phenomenons of exchange and of knocking between different worlds and mutating systems. The question of a poetic transformation of History by a recomposition of force links between the built and the organic is her main interest. She has lived several month in Japan and in Berlin during residencies. Her shootings took place in Dubaï, Tokyo, Hiroshima and on the Azores archipelago. Her work is shown in cinema festivals as well as in exhibitions where her films work in very precise loops. Several solo exhibitions were devoted to her recently : "Supra-Continent" at the Center of Art "Les Eglises", "Mirages à demeure" at the Photographic Center of Ile-de-France, Microclimat at the CCC. In 2009, she exhibits at the Photographic Museum of Salonika and the Museum of Modern Art of Bogotà and takes part in "La Force de l'Art" in 2006 in Paris and in "Emerging Artists" at the Samlug Essl of Vienna in 2005. Critical articles of Pascal Beausse, Paul Ardenne and Eileen Sommerman have been written about her work.