As If a Dog Sniffing a Dead Dog, exhibition. 2018.
 Photo courtesy Romain Darnaud
 Exhibition publication
  • Exhibition text
    As if a dog sniffing a dead dog Forms survive in other contexts, without any possibility of finding the origin of their matrix, the very first and elementary form. They arise to live the experience of anecdotes. Shapes changing context, do not they pursue their quest to be always the same, for fear that we forget them? The exhibition title refers to a poem by Frank Bidart (The Third Hour of the Night) whose free style mixes impressions of a diary, historical references and situations of the everyday life without hierarchy or chronological consistency. The elements succeed after another, disrupting the possibility of accessing a definite and specific temporality. The poem unfolds and wraps itself around like a ribbon, like a circle, like a round. Brutal rhythm, abrupt sounds and combination of the lexical fields of fear, night and uncertainty complete the mystery of a being who refuses to situate her/his identity in her/him or on the contrary in projecting in her/his environment (whether imagined, regretted or simply remembered). The same process of narrative construction stimulates the production of Baha Görkem Yalım for whom the personal elements are the occasion for a reinterpretation of the symbolic, anthropological or formal component. Enlightened empiricism is transfiguration of the real. The real itself is all inclusive. Everything lives, dies, reborn under other probable forms, recognized, unknown. Baha Görkem Yalım refuses standardization of narrative, preferring labyrinthine movements, fortuitous combinations, aesthetic accidents (where the heritage of an artistic movement no longer counts for itself but always and at the same time in relation to a personal writing). He raises the question of the permanence of the subject through the multiplicity of experiences and exposes the narrative identity, as it is understood by Paul Ricoeur according to the principle of a double transfer: from the dialectic governing the narrative to the characters themselves. And in the transfer of this dialectic to personal identity. The permanent balancing between concordance and discordance opens to the complexity of a narrative that is at once open, possible, evolutionary and to its cryptic style, to the dissimulation of the meaning, to the attraction for enigmas. A hand. A yellow hand, hanging on a tree. The circle formed by the dance of a snake. This very same circle broken in the space. The sculptures, small Olympic flames made of paper and plaster, arranged as a round. A race. Its departure. Greyhounds race. A board and its plan. A stroll. Indoor and outdoor spaces. Repetitive barking of stray dogs. Sounds of a night lost in the middle of other nights. Carton sculptures and their metal ears. In this order, in this disorder, and in other arrangements of possible forms. Théo-Mario Coppola
  • A Poem
    When the eye When the edgeless screen receiving light from the edgeless universe When the eye first When the edgeless screen facing outward as if hypnotized by the edgeless universe When the eye first saw that it Hungry for more light resistlessly began to fold back upon itself TWIST As if a dog sniffing Ignorant of origins familiar with hunger As if a dog sniffing a dead dog Before nervous like itself but now weird inert cold nerveless Twisting in panic had abruptly sniffed itself When the eye first saw that it must die When the eye first Brooding on our origins you ask When and I say Then … Frank Bidart, from Third Hour of the Night
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