CUBA STILL (REMAKE)

To open the 2005-2006 season, Galerie B-312 is pleased to welcome Cuba Stills (Remake), Adad Hannah's most recent work. The proposal is in line with the Stills, a series of videos in which the photographic and filmic worlds come together. Stills consist of filming characters in a situation in which the artist has asked them to remain still. This time, Adah Hannah has made the device more complex: in the large room, six video projections of this type are intertwined and form an immense living tableau. Faced with this recomposed image, a multitude of small accidents are imposed, which become so many clues of truth in what already appears as a fiction constructed from scratch. There are, of course, the connections. And then there are all these movements that escape the actors' control. There are also those that escape the author - the wind in the leaves of the trees or someone who enters the camera's field. These projections are accompanied, in the small room, by fragments of photographic impressions from a unique matrix, an anonymous photogram found by the artist in Havana's Chinatown. This image, which inspired the video montage presented in the large room, is incongruous to say the least. With no real origin, so much time is telescoped through it, it transpires the invented, the constructed, the played. One thing is certain, we would not be able to appreciate its facticity without the work it inspired in Adad Hannah. Let's go one step further: Would art and its relationship to the world go the same way as Cuba Stills (Remake) and its relationship to the image that caused it?

—Translated from a text by Jean-Émile Verdier et Émilie Renaud Roy