Download here the Visitor's guide. - Les Ateliers de Rennes

TOLIA ASTALI & DYLAN PEIRCE
Surface Value, 2012. Installation view. Courtesy of the artists. Photography : Achim Kukulies.
Les Prairies's artists
Astali & Peirce's architectonic installations mix constructed shapes and signs of destruction. Their
arrangements of modular elements echo the principle of modernist construction. White, partition-like
plates framed in black, often piled one above the other, are an authoritative statement of their function as
builders. These basic elements are currently used to configure cold settings in black, grey and white with
bureaucratic not to say totalitarian connotations. The two artists also create black and white collages of
found images, which they present on their partitions. These collages are of meaningful figures and elements,
whose referents, however, are lost in the recent and confused past. The connotations are more evocative than
explicit: "We construct the cliché that we would have liked to happen upon". Patterns arise from a contorted
sense of time. It is not clear whether they are the product of memory at work or of memory collapsing.
They become explicit in clear impressions. "The images are like skin that expels fragments towards the
surface". These fragmentary memory aids evoke the old-fashioned, conspiratorial atmosphere of the
communist world. The ambiguous signs lead the spectator to the threshold of understanding only to dash
expectations. In Les Prairies, a 'currency serpent' composed of cents of euro coins is also presented. Apart
from the explicit economic reference, it too arises from the paranoid mysteries of contemporary history.
A. B. tr. J.H.
Tolia Astali was born in 1974 in Tiflis (Georgia), Dylan Peirce was born in 1977 in Paris
(France), they live and work in Berlin (Germany).
Production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012.
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