Choisne views photographing Haiti as a deeply political act. Her photographs of the Caribbean nation are featured in each of her exhibitions, offering a counter-narrative to the exoticisation often present in travel imagery and representations of humanitarian crises and natural disasters. For the series Stéle (Port-au-Prince), she printed images taken primarily in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, after the severe 2010 earthquakes onto concrete slabs. She then treated these prints with salt, which corroded and partly decomposed them, making them resemble fragments rescued from the debris of demolished buildings. This process also alludes to the fragility of memory in a country constantly facing upheaval. Formerly a French colony, Haiti became the first nation in Latin America to declare independence in 1804, following the only successful revolution by enslaved people in world history. However, France‘s demands for compensation to recognise Haiti’s sovereignty significantly crippled the country’s efforts to develop a self-determined republic, and its economy never fully recovered from decades of payments. The country has endured numerous foreign-led military interventions and international aid missions, all of which have been ineffective and instead perpetuated ongoing unrest. Today, Haiti remains marked by colonial continuities and is not only considered an example of failed international diplomacy but is also disproportionately impacted by earthquakes. With her series Stéle, Choisne adopts the stele form, typically associated with commemorative plaques, to pay homage to the Haitian people and their resilience.

THE ART PROJECT: MONUMENT AUX VIVANT·E·S

Several generations of men and women who became slaves were transported, traded, humiliated and mutilated, mistreated, killed without burial and died without a name. How can we mourn them? Inspired by the Kübler-Ross model – which theorizes the concept of mourning as a series of phases supposed to lead to its acceptance – Gaëlle Choisne deploys within the Palais de la Porte Dorée, the former Palace of the Colonies built for the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, a series of gestures, works and moments as so many stages destined to the construction of a Monument to the living – among which a sculptural work that will be installed, in 2023, within the permanent exhibition path of the museum. The former Palais des Colonies carries a painful and conflicting history that we must bring to light in order to question and propose some ways to try to honor our ancestors.© D.R.

CHOC – FIRST STAGE OF MONUMENT AUX VIVANT·E·S
Monument aux Vivant-e-s – CHOC – takes on the traumatic historical process of the slave trade and slavery. Since 2006, France has chosen May 10 to commemorate the memory of these crimes against humanity and their abolition. This year, on this day of mourning, Gaëlle Choisne sets up the space of the Forum du Palais to invite the public to an evening of communion and contemplative meditation played and sung, in a minimal sculptural gesture. Accompanying naturally the mourning from its beginnings, the song, the music and the psalmody transmute the energies of the shock into collective moments of sharing and solidarity.

With :
– Maré Mananga, an amateur Afrofeminist choir that expresses the repertoires of the Afro diaspora.
– Christelle Oyiri aka Crystallmess, DJ, producer, writer and artist, concerned with bringing to light past and present sub-cultures.
– Sophye Soliveau, a singer and harpist who has been nourished by Afro-American music since childhood, is a member of the Seksion Maloya collective (traditional music from Reunion Island) and Àbájade (an Afrojazz group with Cuban influences) on lead vocals, choirs and percussion. She also directs several vocal ensembles (Maré Mananga, Oshun and the Choral Workshop).
– And the backing singers Kelly Carpaye, Eden Tinto Collins, Joseph Decange, Frieda, and Pierre Et La Rose.

Second step in the construction of the Monument aux Vivant-e-s by artist Gaëlle Choisne after CHOC, DÉNI associates the Aquarium to the unconscious, seat of this phase of the grieving process.

Several generations of men and women who became slaves were transported, traded, humiliated and mutilated, mistreated, killed without burial and died without a name. How to mourn?

The stage of Denial induces an unconscious, hidden dimension that we are not ready to see. The Tropical Aquarium becomes the privileged metaphorical place of the unconscious to develop this aspect of mourning. Located in the basement of the Palace, the Aquarium recalls the unconscious and subterranean dimensions of the human being as well as the shadowy parts of the being.

Here, the artist presents denial, the moment when it is difficult to become aware of what has happened. This phase of mourning is materialized by a series of engraved shells (reminiscent of those used in the West Indian trade) scattered in the aquariums of the Palais. The words and phrases inscribed are taken from a poem by Édouard Glissant from the collection Le Sel noir (1983). Some of the messages are directed towards the fish, others are visible to all.

Fourth step in the construction of the Monument aux Vivant-e-s by artist Gaëlle Choisne, FESTIVAL DÉPRESSION mixes cinema, music and performance to address the « mental decompression » caused by the violence suffered by racialized people.

In the grieving process, depression is the troubled moment of latency when one has no strength or hope. « Depression » also refers to the idea of decompression. For Gaëlle Choisne, the denunciation of the « generalized state of depression » among certain racialized people, linked to racism and the injustices they face, leads to a beginning of mental decompression.

In the Forum, the artist invites to a kind of collective care performed, thanks to the music and the word of her guests.

Gaëlle Choisne pays homage to the Haitian composer Carmen Brouard through her work And the sea says nothing, a silent film game, accompanied by musicians Lutxi Nesprias and Julen Zelaia who play La sonate vodouesque.
On the stage work Rainbow Tears, author and actress Jo Güstin celebrates black and queer culture by taking the audience on a journey through its legends. Ndayé Kouagou, artist and performer, follows her with an enigmatic performance based on his writings on discomfort, power and vulnerability.

Lorna Simpson is the mentor of artist Gaëlle Choisne for the third edition of the 2023 Reiffers Art Initiatives mentorship program. The exhibition will be presented at the Reiffers Art Center on the occasion of Art Basel Paris.

For this latest edition of its Mentorship Program, Reiffers Art Initiatives will present an exhibition by artist Gaëlle Choisne, accompanied by her mentor Lorna Simpson – a pioneer in the 80s of conceptual photography that closely links text and image – whose work has been exhibited in numerous prestigious art institutions and events, including the Venice Biennale in 1990. Born in Cherbourg and living in Paris, Gaëlle Choisne is a French artist whose artistic approach is guided by multiple inspirations. In her installations, created at the crossroads of sculpture and photography, she evokes her relationship with her Haitian origins. Represented by Galerie Air de Paris, the artist has already exhibited internationally, notably in London, Kyoto and the United States.

The precession of the equinoxes is an astronomical concept that describes the displacement of the axis around which our planet rotates, affecting the position of the stars as seen from Earth. It returns to its original point every 26,000 years: in astrology, this cycle is broken down by the twelve constellations of the zodiac to associate them with a particular era. So, we are in the process of leaving the age of Pisces for the age of Aquarius, with its virtues of abundance, transformation and hope. Under these cosmic omens, Gaëlle Choisne invites visitors to the Marcel Duchamp Prize to enter a large- scale installation showcasing her work as a video artist, sculptor and painter.

An indefatigable creator of artistic environments that go beyond the exhibition to include banquets, workshops, gardening, body treatments, concerts and performances, Gaëlle Choisne has been building an experimental, multi-faceted archipelago- work for the past ten years. Resolutely curious, her practice embraces a multitude of media and skills, which she hijacks creatively without concern for canon or tradition. A devotee of kitsch aesthetics, her works sweep everyday objects along with them (coins, cigarettes, key rings, false nails), talismans and other carefully collected finds. A builder trained in scenography, she manipulates industrial materials (plaster, concrete, silicone), ceramics and precious metals with the same affection. From this position of referential impurity2 that runs through her work, she deals with the question of the image and the archive as a ‘self-ethnographer’, in other words by tampering with colonial systems of representation through a practice of video and photography that is both reflexive and anthropological. In her films in particular, she allows herself to borrow the voice and tone of the coloniser, while at the same time hijacking its objects of study. Infused with Caribbean diasporic imaginations and a Haitian and French family history, Gaëlle Choisne’s work resonates with the Black Fantasy movement imagined by the British curator Ekow Eshun in a book and exhibition entitled Black Infinity. It brings together artists who find a generative tension between the everyday and the extraordinary to produce new narratives of Black potential. Black fantasy ‘testifies to the conviction that African cultural beliefs and practices are worthy of sincere, rather than sarcastic, consideration as sources of knowledge and creative inspiration’3.

At the Centre Pompidou, Gaëlle Choisne presents an immense carpet of ‘poured cork’ flooring on which five monoliths represent beehives, burrows or termite mounds. Adorned with intricate metalwork, chains and shells, these promontories house small video theatres showing five films made by the artist since 2020 during her travels in Haiti, the Caribbean and Latin America. Initially trained in the dramatic arts, this gesture of miniaturisation reflects her interest in Brecht’s reflections and in epic theatre, which aims to make the spectator aware of his position within the work. From this stellar observation station that plays with scale, the audience can examine a range of human activities: in L’école des actes, the collective fantasising and reclamation of journeys into exile in the Paris region; in Accumulation Primitive, a political and poetic feminist fable about Haiti; in Creole garden in Normandie, sensual gardening in which the plants are the main characters. At the back of the room, the huge paintings on wood from the Safe space for a passing history-Age of Aquarius 99999 series combine pictorial surges, glyphs and talismans with AI-generated faces of strangers. At once a tribute to the activists of the black liberation struggles and a fictional family tree, they act as a cosmogonic cartography that keeps us asking: where are we?

THOMAS CONCHOU