Faithful to the path she has been patiently carving for ten years, Nicène Kossentini presents, on the occasion of her new exhibition at the Selma Feriani Gallery, two new films, as well as a series of photographic sequences. These first-time exhibited works are as much free exercises of remembrance, engaging the temporality of personal memory in a constantly tense relationship between image and text. If the title Je me souviens des recommandations de Mr. le Président (I remember Mr. President's recommendations) is rooted in the family episode of the artist's early childhood, the working protocol applied here follows in the footsteps of Joe Brainard's famous I remember. The artist's approach draws snapshots from her intimate memory, in order to rewind the threads of listening and looking, of reality and fiction. And this, according to the "I remember" formula, to what it gives with one hand and what it takes back with the other. Between the polyphonic framework of the first film to which three anonymous voices lend their stories, and the attempt of scripting something like a memorial blur in the second film, Nicène Kossentini brings into play the materiality of this sensitive medium that is the filmstrip. She also extends the gesture of experimentation to the sequenced order of the photographic shots, between souvenir screens and black photograms. By bending the visibility of the images to the latitudes of the present, and by unfolding through writing the timid echoes of the past, the artist questions a memory offered to montage. And it is in the fragile shadow of subjectivity and its otherness that this exhibition invites us to inhabit the white of intervals.
A text by Adnen Jdey
Translated by Narjes Torchani
