Lili Dujourie

Born in 1941 in Ghent (BE)
Lives and works in Ghent (BE)

Passion de l'été pour l'hiver

1981
Video, black and white, silent
Durée : 15'31"
Year of Purchase: 2003

This collection of restored video films republished by Argos in Brussels encompasses the early works of the Belgian artist Lili Dujourie, a body of work subsequently developed mainly in the form of collages and sculptures. Between 1970 and 1980, her relationship with the new video medium laid down the conditions of a praxis rather than a form. The artist experimented with various types of live recording, with no cuts or scenes, in which she showed herself at some length in simple frames, apparently styleless. The presence of this slowly moving body refers to certain dance and performance practices, but it is rather from a cinematic tradition, capturing things in real time, that the whole work seems to stem. Otherwise put: using video as an objective and neutral instrument for measuring time and space, in the tradition of artists like Andy Warhol or Bruce Nauman. Video. Surveillance. But these pose periods sometimes freeze and crystallize in a fleeting way as romantic pictorial compositions (in Sonnet and Passion de l’été pour l’hiver in particular), not to say like certain icons of modernity (Courbet’s L’Origine du monde, in Hommage à…). This indifference on the part of the act of displaying, which is both apathetic and shameless, combined with a sterilization and stripping of the frame, refers the viewer in the end of the day to the responsibility of his own way of looking at things, between fascination for the suspended split second and disenchanted voyeurism.

^{Guillaume Désanges}