Éric Baudelaire

BIOGRAPHY

(Salt Lake City, 1973) he is an artist and filmmaker based in Paris. After training as a political scientist, he established himself as a visual artist with a research-based practice in several media ranging from printmaking, photography and the moving image to installation, performance and letter writing.

His feature films A Flower in the Mouth (2022), When There Is No More Music To Write (2022), Un Film Dramatique (2019), Also Known As Jihadi (2017), Letters to Max (2014), The Ugly One (2013), and The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images (2011) have circulated widely in film festivals.

When shown within exhibitions, the films are presented within broader installations that include curated projects with works in other media and extensive discursive programmes. He was the recipient of the 2019 Marcel Duchamp prize, and published a monograph titled Make, Do, With at Paraguay Press in 2023.

WORK ON DISPLAY

[sic], 2009

SD video, color, sound
15 min
chronological note

In a bookshop in Kyoto, a clerk receives a box of new books. She leafs through them methodically. Through an extrapolation of the technique of bokashi, she scratches the surfaces of some pages with a blade. Thus, the elements that are considered obscene by Japanese law are being censored, obscenity being defined as «that which unnecessarily excites or stimulates sexual desire». With a poetics of the absurd, the video extends bokashi beyond the issue of desire, censoring photographs which do not portray erotic elements. The clerk, in fact, erases the points of reference contained in the images she is browsing, destabilizing the semantic orientation of the observer. By referring to the arbitrariness of what can or cannot be represented, the short film provokes reflection on what images do or can do.