As part of the Marcel Duchamp 2024 Prize, the Foundation is pleased to support the production of the video work presented by Noémie Goudal, a French photographer and video artist who is one of the four artists nominated this year.
A graduate of the Royal College of Art in London, Noémie Goudal’s practice is based on the construction of illusionist installations, staged in the landscape and then transposed into films, photographs and performances. Steeped in the history of science and palaeoclimatology, Goudal’s approach focuses on the many different ways in which we understand and observe our natural environments. By deconstructing the layers and perspectives of an image, she questions our mental constructions of the landscape. Optical devices, such as anamorphosis, make up these sets, for which she favours a form of craftsmanship and modest special effects.
Presentation of the Supra Strata video work supported by the Foundation
Noémie Goudal’s installation immerses us in enigmatic settings where multiple layers of still and moving images, light and sound create an environment that is both recognisable and alien. A primitive cave in Grand vide [Great Void] and a geological landscape in Supra Strata are caught up in an inescapable movement of disarticulation, generated in one case by the photographic medium dissolving and in the other by its splintering.
Far from any form of catastrophising, Noémie Goudal’s work aims to reverse the way we perceive physical phenomena and the passage of time. The artist draws on science (notably palaeoclimatology), but also on the technical means offered by photography to reveal that which escapes our human senses; she uses experimentation and special effects to reproduce unmeasurable phenomena by hand. In this way, the artist tells a tale of “the extinction and rebirth of the world”, reminding us that earthly reality is not a fixed state but a perpetual cycle between day and night, life and death, order and disorder. Text by Jeanne Brun
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The Marcel Duchamp Prize was created in 2000 by the ADIAF to highlight the richness of the French artistic scene. Its aim is to distinguish and promote internationally the artists who are most representative of their generation. Noémie Goudal is one of the four finalists in the 24th edition of the Marcel Duchamp Prize. Her work will be unveiled at a group exhibition at the Centre Pompidou from 2 October 2024 to 6 January 2025.