Rachel LABASTIE

Feux de camp et autres vestiges

From to

B-Gallery

Sculpture / Installation

For her first solo exhibition in Brussels, Labastie unites three characteristics of her work treating the body, its appearance and disappearance. How does one figure a political and social body crisscrossed by history? Paradoxically, her first sculpture is a video in which the body appears and disappears in a fog of smoke, both dematerialized and constantly reincarnated. This seminal paradox between a title, a work and its suggested ambivalence is at the heart of a work in which the artist prefers the binary of opposing forces, this troubled region, intermediate, where opposing forces meet. A «home» can represent both the place of family or community alliance but also a mass grave; retention objects recalling the history of an a priori bygone time, the physical constraints imposed on slaves or convicts and evoke the permanent monitoring bodies still visible today in other forms. Both attractive and repulsive, the sculptures of Labastie crystallize the contradictions of history and reveal the complexity of the human condition, fashioning a true metaphysic of the body. – Christian Alandete

© Rachel LABASTIE

Exposition