Maria Theodora / Absences
Exhibition, 2006/07

Muséee Zadkine, Paris, within the programme of the Mois de la Photo 2006
Curator Noëlle Chabert, assisted by Catherine Lanson

Photography, artist’s books, film, unedited video installation... As a narration with several voices, Maria Theodora / Absences leads us on the traces of an artistic itinerary from Indonesia to Europe, enriched through a continual back and forth between the past and the present.
Based on a family legend and on colonial reality, Jakob Gautel, as always attentive to the precarity of things that characterizes his work, transposes the banal tragedy of a human destiny into a unique and poetic experience.
The intimist setting of the Musée Zadkine, chosen by him for its sense of oblivion as well as of memory, is the perfect location for this encounter with the figure of Maria Theodora, transformed into a manifold oeuvre, a quest, and with the experimentation of the unedited video installation
Absences, especially created for this exhibition.
On a proposal of the artist, the garden has been transformed into a landscape reminiscent of Indonesia by the gardeners of the Parcs et Jardins de la Ville de Paris.

(Excerpt from the presse release)

Publications :
Maria Theodora, artist’s book, edition Au Figuré and FRAC Haute-Normandie, with the support of the Banque Neuflize, the Centre Culturel Français and the Goethe-Institut Jakarta, 2005.
Batavia 1997, limited DVD edition, 2006.
Absences, artist’s book in form of a folded zigzag, “carte blanche pour textes nocturnes” to the writers Ios Karaïndrou, Claire Legendre and Henri-Alexis Baatsch, after and based on the nocturnal panorama by Jakob Gautel, edition Paris-Musées, 2006.

→  Musée Zadkine

Before being shown at the Musée Zadkine, the photo series was also shown at the Centre Culturel Français Jakarta, in 1997 (invited by Yves Ollivier), at the Centre d’art contemporain de Kerguéhennec, in 1999 (curator Denys Zacharopoulos) and at the Atelier sur l’Autoroute, Saint-Denis.


Voir aussi
#Installations #Memory #Photography #Who’s Who ? #Clothes #Nature, Plants, Gardens