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ANTANANARIVO
OCTOBER 13 - NOVEMBER 11, 2022
Fondation H - Antananarivo are delighted to host Oxymore, a photographic exhibition by Viviane Rakotoarivony, vice-winner of the 2022 Prix Paritana, a Fondation H program. Since its creation in 2017, this contemporary art prize has been supporting the Malagasy art scene, and is awarded annually to three artists who are either citizens or residents of Madagascar. As a result, Viviane Rakotoarivony received personalized support from the Fondation H team, as well as a production grant to set up herexhibition.
Born in Antananarivo in 1984, Viviane Rakotoarivony has been practicing photography for over ten years and sees it as a therapeutic way of finding answers to psychological questions on how human beings and the universe work. She seeks to overcome her struggle to mesh her thoughts together by using photography as a means to her quest. The encounter between her alter ego [her purpose] and this otherness [her subjects] depicts her attempt at mental construction: from thought structuring, a form of expression, a way of being in the world to that of a photographic corpus.
In her exhibition Oxymore, Viviane Rakotoarivony sees images as a storyboard, each photograph viewed as a shot contributing to the making of a story. Also, by using chronophotography, the artist structures story temporality, since the technique allows for images to be taken in very quick succession, which helps analyzing a moving subject—dancing, in this instance. Through this clash between the static and timeless nature of photography and the ephemeral aspect of dance, the meaning of the exhibition title is fully fleshed out.
Fascinated by contemporary dance, she works with choreographers to produce this series of shots emphasizing their movements. Dance is a living, ephemeral art that encompasses a succession of body movements developing within space and time, and vanishing as soon as they come into being, while photography is a medium that aims to capture a moment out of time in order to fix it onto a support. As she transcends the static aspect of photography, she deconstructs movements andtime.
