Jardin secret
Performance as part of the Mezzanine Sud vernissage
As part of the opening of the exhibition Mezzanine Sud - Prix des Amis des Abattoirs, prize-winning artist Socheata Aing invites you to discover her performance entitled Jardin secret, based on her own words about intimacy.
"Secret garden is an intimate moment when I reveal the invisible links.
How do we preserve and maintain invisible links with our loved ones? We never stop inventing rituals, gestures of remembrance, presences that accompany us on a daily basis, on our own scale. Sometimes it's a password, a recipe, a film, a smell or a tattoo. The performance Jardin secret tenderly reveals one of these rituals that is close to my heart."
Socheata Aing, born in Dourdan (91), is a performance and visual artist who graduated from the Institut Supérieur des Arts et du Design de Toulouse (isdaT) in 2019. She lives and works between Neuchâtel in Switzerland and Toulouse.
Her visual and performance practice incorporates texts and objects that she has created herself, seeking to enable everyone to identify with their own world through her work. They explore emotional memories and the acceptance of our fears and anxieties.
Her exhibition project Jardin Secret examines various themes linked to memories, intimate space and family heritage. She seizes on modest, sometimes childlike reference points, such as a birthday, a favourite colour, the pronunciation of a first name? familiar landmarks that enable her to question family trajectories, particularly those of immigrant origin.
Les petites mémoires is the initial text on which Socheata Aing bases her work. Centred on the notion of the anecdote (Claire de Ribaupierre, 2007), these texts are a collection of images, gestures and sensations. Her project is characterised by a desire to perform memorial rituals, gently linking the dead and the living. Socheata Aing has also produced a film based on family archives entitled La Double absence. The aim of the exhibition is to present projects that have been constructed independently but are linked together, so as to create an intimate universe for the public.
Before taking part in the Mezzanine Sud exhibition at Les Abattoirs, the artist enriched her career by taking part in several notable group exhibitions in 2024, including Merle Blanc at Galerie 3.1 in Toulouse, Une affaire de famille at La Passerelle, centre d'art contemporain in Brest, and Jardin Partagé at the Cité internationale des Arts in Paris during a residency.
She has also produced a number of outstanding performances, including S'occuper de ses oignons at the Museum of Photography in Antwerp for the exhibition Her Voice, echoes of Chantal Akerman, and Faire un éclat, which was presented in September 2023 for the 50th anniversary of the Capc in Bordeaux, at the invitation of Föhn.