Joëlle de La Casinière: absolument nécessaire

Curated by Astrid Mania

In the year 1971 French artist Joëlle de La Casinière sold all of her paintings and her motorcycle, and, with light luggage, embarked on a journey to South America. It was the beginning of a journey around the world and through many worlds that has not yet come to an end. La Casinière's extraordinary work is in keeping with her nomadic lifestyle and is intimately linked with the impressions and restrictions involved in travelling. Structured along an idiosyncratic system of references, her collages, manuscripts and video works talk about autobiographic and historical moments as well as the evils of the medium of television.

Sixty of these wonderfully eclectic collages - the "Tablotins" - are presented at croy nielsen. They combine calligraphy-style writing and ornament, stickers from advertising and children's albums, found fragments from everyday objects, postcards, and photographs. They are private and intimate notebooks as much as they are critical commentary and observations of contemporary life.

La Casinières first book, "Absolument nécessaire - The Emergency Book", was published in 1973 with Les Editions de Minuit in Paris. In "A Thousand Plateaus", it is celebrated by Deleuze/Guattari as one of the rare successful examples of a truly nomadic book. It is a unique travel diary, marked by the distinctive handwriting of the artist. "La première partie du roi Henri IV de double V Shakespeare : une analogie" is the celluloid extension of the book and amalgamates - like most video works by the artist - image, writing, and sound. It documents the dream of a group of artists around La Casinière to stage Shakespeare's "Henry IV" amid the picturesque setting in the streets of a small town in Columbia, with its inhabitants as actors.

The manuscript and video of the same title "Grimoire Magnétique" are based on the hagiography of 10 th century Islamic martyr Al Hallâj. With a libretto by La Casinière, and a musical accompaniment composed by Jacques Lederlin, the video is a kind of prototypical 'video-clip' and marries, just as much as the book, traditional and contemporary imagery, European and non-European cultures. The video was shown at documenta 8 in 1983. Both books and videos will be on display at croy nielsen.

A selection of Joëlle de La Casinière's video works will be presented at the Videoforum at NBK on May 17 at 7 p.m., with a short introduction by Astrid Mania.