Now
you’re
inside me
Solo show, 2024
at Galerie Valeria Cetraro, Paris (Fr)
Text by Andrew Hodgson
Featured works :
at Galerie Valeria Cetraro, Paris (Fr)
Text by Andrew Hodgson
Featured works :
︎ Now you’re inside me, it doesn’t mean we’ll collegially agree on all topic Film 2024With Giulia Terminio
Now you’re inside me, it doesn’t mean we’ll collegially agree on all topics Film 2024
Video 4K, color, stereo sound, 13’
Steel frame, led screen 2m x 1m, steel bench with 3 seats, awning with steel structure and black calais lace
︎Now you’re inside me, it doesn’t mean we’ll collegially agree on all topics Film 2024
Video 4K, color, stereo sound, 13’
with Giulia Terminio, Laura Gozlan
Production : Semis-Lieu de Fabrication, Paquita Milville, FRAC Picardie, DRAC Hauts-de-France, Région Hauts-de-France
Life and Death in the Laura Gozlan Cinematic Universe (LGCU)With her new show ‘Now you’re inside me,’ French filmmaker and sculptor Laura Gozlan invites the viewer into the catacombs underneath the Zone Rouge – the red zone, an area in northern France so
resplendent with century old corpses, unexploded ordinance and untriggered canisters of mustard
gas that little to no life is said to be able to thrive there. And yet, with the video work shown here, also titled Now you’re inside me (2024), down within the storied medieval quarries underneath the
early-20 th century battlefields along the river Aisne, two players are figured in a high-kitsch moral debate. The young figure of Faust has become lost, and falls through the cut stone corridors from an
illegal rave still audible back somewhere else in the underearth. As she clambers through the vaults, she comes across Mum. Mum is a yellow-eyed husk dressed in the suit of a b-movie Frankenstein’s
Monster, costuming that references that of 1970s Hammer Horror films. Mum is eager to peddle the mind-altering substances that Faust has been taking during her time at the rave, and that initiate the
hallucinatory scene here. Mum is also eager to peddle her own green-glowing soul, that eventually brings this episode to climax. Between Faust and Mum there is a debate that centres ageing, youth,
and the creeping death of lived life. It is the kind of argument that might take place between two
prostitutes of differing generations in an early-morning brasserie after a long shift and too much pastis, or the kind that might take place in a deal struck with Satan.
The slipping ambiguity between these two planes of meaning, between the grimier fog-eyed edges of our quotidian banal and another deathly plane vaguely mirrored of our own, inform the core aesthetic and narrative drives of Gozlan’s work in film. Now you’re inside me is the fourth instalment in the wider MOTHER series that has been shown in artistic and cinematic venues over the last five years. The tone of the series is set from the initial scenes of its first chapter titled Y.E.S. I Mum Pls (2019), where the Gozlan-played protagonist, Mum, smokes the goo and remaining body parts of an ancient Egyptian mummy in desperate search for the undeath of immortality. She does so after a
liquid-filled sarcophagus was found in Alexandria, Egypt in 2018, and a successful online petition was made on Change.org titled ‘let people drink the red liquid from the dark sarcophagus.’ The petition
stated, “we need to drink the red liquid from the cursed dark sarcophagus in the form of some sort of carbonated energy drink so we can assume its powers and finally die.” Though Gozlan’s character
chose to smoke the goo rather than carbonate it, it is in desperately following this same drive that she is found underground in the fourth video work. Here, Mum wrestles for a small glowing effigy of Casper the Friendly Ghost, her own soul drawn from her waning body, which she now forces down the throat of the unsuspecting Faust. In the violent throes of this bargaining it is not clear who might have the upperhand. The interaction appears, instead, in the vein of a curse being bodily, forcibly passed from one host to another. There is a sense of contagion, of a decrepitude that accrues and spreads without end.
These are themes drawn from the experimental fiction of Pierre Klossowski, and his controversial 1965 novel Le Baphomet. The book takes the form of a fragmentary narrative in which the spirits of
immolated medieval monks reconvene centuries after their execution to possess the living, and debate life and death, the horrors of social morality and recommit to its sexual transgression. Within this undying binary play of Eros and Thanatos it is established that “souls separated from their bodies should have the privilege to deign what is true, and what is false.” What that truth or falsity may be is
however itself vague and fragmented, as the narrative is tinted by the hallucinatory chemical processes of dying upon the perceiving faculties of the brain in its final instances of function.
Similarly, events in Gozlan’s films are presented as the fugue of a mind as it waxes into death, the chamber piece sets, underground sewage tunnels, 19 th century troglodyte abodes, and world war bomb bunkers take on a sense of the innards of a calcifying mind, as the embodied multiplicity of consciences that reside within it desperately seek a spiritual life beyond their biological end. In this sense the film here shown could perhaps be seen as sludge-baroque retelling of the Pixar film Inside Out (2015), though extrapolated far into the inferno Disney productions fear to tread.
‘Now you’re inside me,’ precedes a second showing at the gallery, which will include physical works demonstrating the artist’s recent sculptural practice. This object work is present also here. Within the
white cube of the gallery setting, Gozlan has constructed a theatrical environment; the metal structure that holds the large LED screen in place in the centre of the gallery, its guts and blinking lights of its construction left laid bare and open to view. Gozlan has also constructed a bench in metal upon which the audience sit to be engulfed by the unframed viewing surface. In this sense, Gozlan’s
directing eye and hand leave the screen, and spread the contagion of the images presented into the exhibition space itself, and in which the gallery space becomes the quarried corridors where French soldiers hid from German bombardment during the Second Battle of the Aisne in 1917. Where, following that battle, those that did not die, mutinied. As such, the white room is displaced, and becomes the rhizomatic network of tunnels of a dying brain where its chimerical elements drug
themselves as they approach their end, and others ineffectively work to find some escape. When the green soul has passed from Mum to Faust, Faust breaks the fourth-wall and speaks directly to the
viewer upon their metal-welded seating, where the audience is told that they have entered this rhizome in an effort “to solve the mystery of their own subjugation.” Whether an artwork is able to answer such questions is a key anxiety upon which Gozlan’s works pivot, and are here given answer with the removal of a diamond from Mum’s dead anus, from which her pneuma, her spirit, escapes. Her last breath, or last blow, as the word might equally etymologically denote; a final whispering act of expulsion of gas from one or another orifice. Gozlan’s video work here presented therefore presents the viewer with fundamental questions around what it is to be human, and without
sentiment depicts the abstracted, embodied process of the impending collapse of life into death we all await. In doing so, she confronts the viewer with the realities of our end, that comes not with a bang, but a whimpering escape of air.
Andrew Hodgson
The slipping ambiguity between these two planes of meaning, between the grimier fog-eyed edges of our quotidian banal and another deathly plane vaguely mirrored of our own, inform the core aesthetic and narrative drives of Gozlan’s work in film. Now you’re inside me is the fourth instalment in the wider MOTHER series that has been shown in artistic and cinematic venues over the last five years. The tone of the series is set from the initial scenes of its first chapter titled Y.E.S. I Mum Pls (2019), where the Gozlan-played protagonist, Mum, smokes the goo and remaining body parts of an ancient Egyptian mummy in desperate search for the undeath of immortality. She does so after a
liquid-filled sarcophagus was found in Alexandria, Egypt in 2018, and a successful online petition was made on Change.org titled ‘let people drink the red liquid from the dark sarcophagus.’ The petition
stated, “we need to drink the red liquid from the cursed dark sarcophagus in the form of some sort of carbonated energy drink so we can assume its powers and finally die.” Though Gozlan’s character
chose to smoke the goo rather than carbonate it, it is in desperately following this same drive that she is found underground in the fourth video work. Here, Mum wrestles for a small glowing effigy of Casper the Friendly Ghost, her own soul drawn from her waning body, which she now forces down the throat of the unsuspecting Faust. In the violent throes of this bargaining it is not clear who might have the upperhand. The interaction appears, instead, in the vein of a curse being bodily, forcibly passed from one host to another. There is a sense of contagion, of a decrepitude that accrues and spreads without end.
These are themes drawn from the experimental fiction of Pierre Klossowski, and his controversial 1965 novel Le Baphomet. The book takes the form of a fragmentary narrative in which the spirits of
immolated medieval monks reconvene centuries after their execution to possess the living, and debate life and death, the horrors of social morality and recommit to its sexual transgression. Within this undying binary play of Eros and Thanatos it is established that “souls separated from their bodies should have the privilege to deign what is true, and what is false.” What that truth or falsity may be is
however itself vague and fragmented, as the narrative is tinted by the hallucinatory chemical processes of dying upon the perceiving faculties of the brain in its final instances of function.
Similarly, events in Gozlan’s films are presented as the fugue of a mind as it waxes into death, the chamber piece sets, underground sewage tunnels, 19 th century troglodyte abodes, and world war bomb bunkers take on a sense of the innards of a calcifying mind, as the embodied multiplicity of consciences that reside within it desperately seek a spiritual life beyond their biological end. In this sense the film here shown could perhaps be seen as sludge-baroque retelling of the Pixar film Inside Out (2015), though extrapolated far into the inferno Disney productions fear to tread.
‘Now you’re inside me,’ precedes a second showing at the gallery, which will include physical works demonstrating the artist’s recent sculptural practice. This object work is present also here. Within the
white cube of the gallery setting, Gozlan has constructed a theatrical environment; the metal structure that holds the large LED screen in place in the centre of the gallery, its guts and blinking lights of its construction left laid bare and open to view. Gozlan has also constructed a bench in metal upon which the audience sit to be engulfed by the unframed viewing surface. In this sense, Gozlan’s
directing eye and hand leave the screen, and spread the contagion of the images presented into the exhibition space itself, and in which the gallery space becomes the quarried corridors where French soldiers hid from German bombardment during the Second Battle of the Aisne in 1917. Where, following that battle, those that did not die, mutinied. As such, the white room is displaced, and becomes the rhizomatic network of tunnels of a dying brain where its chimerical elements drug
themselves as they approach their end, and others ineffectively work to find some escape. When the green soul has passed from Mum to Faust, Faust breaks the fourth-wall and speaks directly to the
viewer upon their metal-welded seating, where the audience is told that they have entered this rhizome in an effort “to solve the mystery of their own subjugation.” Whether an artwork is able to answer such questions is a key anxiety upon which Gozlan’s works pivot, and are here given answer with the removal of a diamond from Mum’s dead anus, from which her pneuma, her spirit, escapes. Her last breath, or last blow, as the word might equally etymologically denote; a final whispering act of expulsion of gas from one or another orifice. Gozlan’s video work here presented therefore presents the viewer with fundamental questions around what it is to be human, and without
sentiment depicts the abstracted, embodied process of the impending collapse of life into death we all await. In doing so, she confronts the viewer with the realities of our end, that comes not with a bang, but a whimpering escape of air.
Andrew Hodgson
Press
The Art Newspaper, Patrick Javault 2024