Catalogue > At random
Cécile Hartmann
Le Serpent Noir
Experimental doc. | hdv | color | 44:23 | France | 2021
The gigantic Keystone pipeline delivers 700,000 barrels of impure oil every day, from boreal forest open-air exploitations through the Great Plains of the Sioux Nation, spoiling lands and water resources. In a voyage in the heart of darkness, contemporary history returns to the prophetic time of beginnings : "when there was no moon or star”. A place of shadow, emergence and disappearance.
Cécile Hartmann is a french artist and filmmaker based in Paris. Born in Colmar, she studies Art at the National Fine Arts Academy of Paris (2000) and Art History in Human Sciences at the University of Strasbourg. Inspired by documentary aesthetics and Minimalism, her work questionnes the divisions between a constructed world and a natural world. Using different mediums and image regimes she fuses video, photography and performative gestures to create effects of instability and sublimity in her representations. Close to the terrestrial surface, in search for hidden layers and collective mythologies, her cinematic language plays on the indecisive nature of perception, between the visible and invisible, the organic and non-organic, past and futur. Main exhibitions included : Le Serpent Noir, MABA, Nogent-sur-Marne, Achrone, MOCA, Hiroshima, Et voici la lumière, Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogotá, The family of the invisibles, SEMA Séoul Museum of Art, AGITATIONISM, Eva Internationale Bienniale, Limerick, De la Casa a la Fabrica, Palau la Virreina, Barcelone, French Edges, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Paysages de la conscience, MAMBO, Bogotà, Microclimat, CCC, Tours.