Galerie Christophe Gaillard Brussels is pleased to present its first solo exhibition devoted to the work of French artist SMITH. Through a body of work that spans many disciplines including photography, film, installation, performance and research, SMITH explores the porosities of human identity, focusing on its internal complexities and its manifestations in the outside world - from the cosmos to the invisible.
Born in Paris in 1985, SMITH’s academic path has taken him from the University of Paris-Sorbonne studying Philosophy (2007), to Aalto University in Helsinki (2008), the National School of Photography in Arles (2010), and Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains (2012), culminating in a PhD in Research-Creation at UQAM in Montreal. SMITH regularly collaborates with scientists and researchers, such as teams from the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research) and the IRAP (Institute for Research in Astrophysics and Planetology). Moreover, he frequently works with philosophers, designers, engineers, astronauts, dancers and musicians. His multi-faceted oeuvre is imbued with these diverse influences and disciplines.
In doing this, SMITH composes a work that is unlimited in its temporality. By integrating self-experimentation and investigation, the artist’s body becomes a critical and experimental platform through which he examines his own experience to reveal new ways of thinking. His works are curious, in the etymological sense of cura: curiosity and attention to the world around us, the terrestrial and the celestial, the human and the non-human, the visible and the invisible, the imaginary and the fictional. Thermal cameras, drones, neon lights, implanted microchips and subcutaneous meteorites, atomic mutations and trance-like practices characterise his work, which is composed using technological means that incorporate the dimensions of mystery, the spiritual and of dreams.
All my projects are about imagining worlds, lifestyles, dimensions and states of being that are free of binaries, dualities and oppositions, and formulating hypotheses for new human configurations. I explore and experiment with metamorphosis and the porosity of identity through a range of practices: transition of gender, time, state of consciousness, plasticity, atomic hybridisa- tion, biotechnological mutations, interspecific relationships, etc. But also to defy biological and ‘natural’ constraints, through the recurrent use of certain ancestral and ultra-contemporary technologies: biotechnologies (hormonal), cognitive technologies, phytoshamanic technologies, psychic technologies (the practice of dreaming, meditation)... And, of course, the aim is to recreate these experiences, these points of view, precisely through their shift into the realm of the visible.
SMITH has presented his work in institutions such as the Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, Arles (2024), the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2023-24), the Centre Vox, Montreal (2023), the Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie, Arles (2012 and 2021), the Musée des Beaux-Arts du Locle (2019), the Palais de Tokyo (2018)... SMITH also devotes his time to lecturing (Sciences Po, Paris; Grand Palais Ephémère, Paris; Collège de France and Institut Henri-Poincaré, Paris; Ryerson University, Toronto; University of California, Santa Cruz; MUTEK Festival, San Francisco; Planetarium, Centre Pompidou). He also teaches at Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains, in Tourcoing. He is an associate artist at La Filature (Scène Nationale - Mulhouse), and winner of the 2023 Villa Albertine award in Los Angeles.
