Manon De Boer

Dissonant, 2010

Video projection: video, color, sound, video projection or projection from 16mm film, 10'40".

Work presented as part of the exhibition Echos d'une collection - Works by Frac Franche-Comté

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First we see Cynthia Loemij, a dancer with the Rosas company, listening to a piece by Eugène Ysaye(Trois sonates pour violon). She's all concentration, barely swaying her head, as if this small gesture enabled her to make the rhythm her own. Then she performs a choreography without music, entirely in memory of what she has just heard.

The director also imposed a technical constraint on herself: to change the three-minute film every time the reel was interrupted, while the dancer continued her action. This corresponds to a black screen moment in the film.

Manon De Boer offers a portrait of the dancer, her concentration and her capacity for memory. The performative aspect of the filming is a frequent feature of the artist's work, instilling it with added tension.

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Manon De Boer

Born in 65 in Kodaikanal (India)

Lives and works in Brussels

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Manon de Boer studied at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam and at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Her work focuses mainly on the moving image, although it has diversified in recent years. She shoots mainly on 16 and 35 mm film, a choice that reflects the importance of time and experience in her work, as a theme, and even in the making of the work itself. The production process can even take on a performative form, without even an audience, simply to give the piece added tension.

Manon de Boer is a portrait artist. In fact, she began by filming her loved ones on Super-8, in black and white, capturing moments when they forgot about the camera, concentrating on their faces. With Laurien, March 1996 - Laurien, September 2001 - Laurien, October 2007 (1996-2007), she goes one step further, shooting a two-and-a-half-minute film in three moments, eleven years apart. A woman reads the newspaper, but all we see is her face, her eyes moving from one column to the next, and we search her features, her attention, for what connects her to the world through this reading.

Manon De Boer is also responsible for an atypical portrait of Sylvia Kristel, actress in the film Emmanuelle (1974), Sylvia Kristel - Paris (2003).

Manon De Boer approached performance with dancer and choreographer Latifa Laâbissi, with whom she has collaborated since 2015 on a whole series of pieces, ranging from film to sound installation. The work began with lengthy exchanges around the various references that inhabit the two women, whether common to them or not, such as Marguerite Duras, Serge Daney, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Oum Kalthoum or Casey. Thus, in the film Ghost Party (2), which follows the performance, they manipulate a series of vases that personify their "ghosts", to whom they give voice, and whom they bring together.