"Fifth Body", Noemie Goudal's exhibition at Le Bal

LE BAL is the crowning point of a three-year adventure to create an independent venue for the document-image; the image in all its forms – photography, video, film and new media – as a means of representing reality. The structure presents its first monographic exhibition in France, untitled « The fifth body» and devoted to Noémie Goudal, taking place from the 12th february to the 8th of May 2016.

NOEMIE GOUDAL: BETWEEN FICTION AND REALITY

Noémie Goudal has participated in multiple collective exhibitions, among them an exhibit at the Saatchi Gallery in 2012, in London, and an appearance at the Azerbaijan pavilion for the 2015 edition of the Venice Biennale. She has also numerous individual exhibitions – At the New Art Gallery Walsall in 2014, the FOAM of Amsterdam in 2015, and the Photographers’ Gallery in London in the autumn 2015. At LE BAL in Paris, she will exhibit her work from february 12th to May 8th 2016.

In Search of the First Line IV © Noémie Goudal, Courtesy Noémie Goudal / Galerie Les filles du calvaire / Galerie Edel Assanti

THE EXHIBITION: “THE FIFTH BODY”

The exhibition « The fifth body» comprises three series, In Search of the First Line (2014), Observatories  (2014) and Southern Light Stations (2015), as well as unedited site-specific artworks for LE BAL exhibition space.

Winner of the HSBC photography prize in 2013, Noémie Goudal creates from scratch ambiguous photographs/sculptures. She sets up her paper-made sculptures in natural surroundings, thus creating new perspectives. These architectural elements (stairs, domes, towers) or cosmic ellipses are then placed in virgin oceans or desert sceneries.

If you let your eye linger on these compositions, you could see cords and cables that reveal her bogus enactment, thus unveiling the nature of these two-dimension objects created for the sole purpose of being photographed.

Station II – Noémie Goudal, Courtesy Noémie Goudal / Edel Assanti / Les filles du calvaire

Through In Search of the First Line, the artist aims to shrink time by intertwining ancient buildings with the industrial concrete. Her series Observatories depict buildings, factories and werehouses, photographed in Germany, France or the UK, floating in an undefined space, evoking hereby the cosmic architectural wonders in Delhi and Jaipur in the 18th century. The black and white and frames used by the artist are also reminiscent of the esthetical components of Bernd and Hilla Becher industrial buildings typologies. In fact, the observatories do not exist; they are constructed from two-dimensional printed images, meticulously put together to create a sense of perspective, without any digital editing.

Observatoire IX © Noémie Goudal, 2014, Courtesy Noémie Goudal / Galerie Les filles du calvaire / Galerie Edel Assanti

In Southern Light Stations, Noémie Goudal explores the celestial space. Considered as the mirror of terrestrial debaucheries and the ultimate symbol of divinity, from the ancient times to the Middle Ages, the sky has welcomed the passing of whirling spheres and lightning fireballs. The Earth is often described as affixed to the water, and the sky as a vault covering and limiting it on every part. The work of Noeme Goudal is directly nourished by man’s inquiry of the Universe, where imagination span to the infinite, like a fifth ether-like body (or a fifth element). Both images and objects, the installations of Noémie Goudal flout these considerations. Aiming to blur our landmarks, they swing between reality and hallucination, mirroring the complexity of modern life where contradictory truths coexist.