Voile de Kodak
Reading performed by Aram Kebabdjian and Stéfane Perraud
As part of the exhibition ‘Ouvrir les yeux. Collections photographiques des Abattoirs et de la Galerie Le Château d'Eau’, visual artist Stéfane Perraud and writer Aram Kebabdjian reveal the inexorable links between photography and radioactive material.
Without the invention of photography, the nuclear bomb would probably never have existed. That, at least, is what Le Voile de Kodak seeks to establish. Drawing on scientific, philosophical and artistic archives, Stéfane Perraud and Aram Kebabdjian collaborate and freely explore the history of these related developments, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day.
For the duration of a performance reading, the artists take the audience into a maelstrom of media and texts. They push the notions of document and realism to the limits of fiction: a hybrid approach, utopian and restless, funny and surprising.
Stéfane Perraud is a visual artist and Aram Kebabdjian a writer. Somewhere between art and science, literature and documents, cutting-edge technology and rudimentary forms, they are archaeologies of our time. Zone bleue, a virtual reality film, explores the long-term future of nuclear waste. Hysteresia, a zombie satellite observatory, listens to waste orbiting in the sky. Archives gamma is a series of lectures exploring nuclear civilisation and the humanity associated with it. Kodak's Veil’ is the first lecture in this series.