CHRISTIAN ASCHMAN & LAURIANNE BIXHAIN

WHAT REMAINS IS AN INTERMEDIARY THING, REPEATED

In the framework of the European Month of Photography in Luxembourg, Christian Aschman reconsiders his Tokyo project undertaken in 2014, the images of which were first published in The Space in between, an artist's book published in 2015 and edited by Th.ophile's Papers. Varying the way he exhibits his images – he sometimes sticks them on posters in public places in the streets of Paris or exhibits them deconstructed – he decided this time to show the full image. Nine years after their date of shooting, these photographs with simple forms constitute a body of images that can be randomly placed in space. In perpetual mutation in time and space, these images and sequences of images reveal the gaps, the delicate hesitations, the presence and the absence, the expectation, the movement of bodies, the shivers, the positioning, the uncertainty, the choice or non-choice. In a conversation with Christian Aschman, the critic St.phane L.ger made the following statement: «When I look at your photographic production in the metropolises and capitals of the world over nearly twenty years, I cannot qualify it as architectural photography, even if the latter constitutes its substance or matter. I also have the feeling that these simple forms that you have been photographing for a long time cannot be exhausted, that in their simplicity they open up a multiplicity of gazes in a temporal continuum.”

As for Laurianne Bixhain, she provided the text below written by Chloe Chignell in conversation with her photographs. ”I am preoccupied with ordinary affects. I am not interested in the depths of my own experience. I work hard to stay at the surface, to keep my head above water, breathing, as they say. This takes practice. I repeat gestures again and again, to understand their ordinariness. In case a gesture would rouse some kind of affect higher or lower than the ordinary, I slow it down or speed it up to empty out its depths. To know that a scream can be illustrated by a sequence of repeating ahh's is comforting. What remains is a partial thing, remembered. My face emerges from something thick, from something glowing. I give almost a profile, but I do not permit myself the full angle. I will not turn my gaze. I will not clarify my face.I will not sharpen my edges. I will not be your subject, nor your foreground. I will be an eternal intermediary. My movements are an unchanging drift. I reach towards becoming a perfectly rehearsed ambiguity, like the curtain that falls behind and yet still covers. What remains is a blurred thing, shining.”

Chloe Chignell is an artist working across text, choreography and publishing.