Silver Memories
When contemplating the end of silver ore and looking at a silver halide photograph, are we possibly observing our own finitude? Daphné Le Sergent
As part of the 8th edition of the European Month of Photography, titled "Rethinking Nature / Rethinking Landscape", the Korean-born French artist Daphné Le Sergent (b. 1975) presents Silver Memories, a series of landscape representations combining photography, drawing and video.
Based on the assessment that silver ore is becoming increasingly rare, Le Sergent constructs a hybrid artistic narrative where analogue photography plays a pivotal role in investigating topical artistic, economic and ecological issues. Consisting of a video projection and an installation of photographs and photo-drawings created specifically for the exhibition space at Casino Luxembourg, her sensitive multimedia work charts the production of silver halide film from mining to stock market variations.
In her pencil drawings on photographs, the graphite appears to take the place of the silver, and the written trace dominates the photographic index. Her play with scale, which draws on Walter Benjamin’s observations on the relationship between near and far, between the auratic projection in the depths of the matter and the parodic reflection emerging from its surface, also nods to the late nineteenth-century pictorialist aesthetic.
Daphné Le Sergent (b. 1975 in South Korea, lives and works in France) conducts artistic and theoretical research around the concepts of schism and border. By means of varying arrangements (photo or video polyptychs) and confrontations of different image areas (photo-drawings), she creates a dissociation in the direct perception of the image that evidences the gaps or cracks in the intimate sphere of the gaze.
Recent personal exhibitions include Silver Memories: The Desire for Rare Things (2021), Centre Photographique d’Île-de-France, Pontault-Combault; Silver Memories: How to Reach the Origin (2019), Atelier Hermès, Seoul (South Korea); and Geopolitics of Oblivion (2018), Jeu de Paume, Paris, CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, and Museo Amparo, Puebla (Mexico).
Silver Memories, le désir des choses rares, another part of the project shown at the Casino, is currently on view at the Centre Photographique d'Île-de-France (CPIF) until July 18, 2021 (www.cpif.net).
Daphné Le Sergent is a lecturer at Université de Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis and a member of AICA..
