To reflect on the destiny of humanity, Angelika Markul’s work combines the forces of nature with the upheavals caused by the actions of mankind. Videos, sculptures and environments form landscapes that oscillate between zones of meditation and zones of turbulence. The artist leads us to our most inner depths, where ecological preoccupations and questions that have perplexed humanity for time immemorial, a fascination with technology and a contemplation of the vastness of nature resonate. A complex set of forces is at play within the artist’s hands as she summons the specters of a multitude of natural or industrial catastrophes. We stroll through the exhibition as we might explore a complex scenario, where each work startles, shakes up our memory: “I reconstruct a memory by associating actual remembrances with other images, which I encounter and film,” explain the artist. “My relationship to memory stems from my obsession with death and with my own history.”

Since the early 2000s, Angelika Markul (born in 1977, lives and works in Paris) has been building up a body of dark and powerful work, mapping out humanity all the way to its furthest reaches. Time, memory, man and nature are so many guiding principles for the artist who focuses particularly on unusual and desolate landscapes. Her practice shifts between video, sculpture and installation, directing a gaze at once poetic and aesthetic on perilous or contentious situations. Not afraid to shoot her films in locations where death has struck or where danger still threatens (Fukushima, Chernobyl, Bagdad, etc.), she brings together in her films current images of natural or man-made disasters with immemorial questions. But the question is not so much “Where do we come from?” as it is “Where are we going? And for how long still?”
For her first major solo exhibition in France, Angelika Markul is presenting a body of recent work – in some cases for the first time. Terre de départ -the title of this exhibition- refers to a belief held by Native Americans in Chile that man is only temporarily of this planet, seen as a transit zone or a simple starting point, before heading towards the stars. The exhibition alternates confrontation -with works imbued with violence- and pauses -moments of contemplation and introspection- in the silence and immensity of the void, before getting back to the Palais de Tokyo’s labyrinthine architecture and returning to the surface.

This exhibition benefits from the support of: SAM Art Projects ; Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques ; Institut Polonais Paris ; Muzeum Sztuki Łodz (Poland) ; Eva Albarran & co.

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