Topographie de l'art gives carte blanche to photographer and theorist Catherine Rebois, who since 2014 has been developing a series of exhibitions around contemporary and often experimental photography. For this 2025 edition, she is inviting photographic artists to exhibit and engage in dialogue on the theme of re-presentation.
To re present is to present once again. It's a return, a reprise. It's a presentation that duplicates another by incorporating new issues. It's the desire to envisage a new interpretation, one that renews and compels the viewer. It means reflecting on what has already been presented and on what could be presented again in space and time.
As we know, art is born of copying and imitating reality. The artist never produces ex nihilo; his practice is always nourished by references. Art reproduces the (pre-) existing. The interest of re presentation lies in the gap that is created and developed between the original reference and the new creation. Seeing and looking involve seeing and looking a second time, re considering, re thinking and re challenging. There is what we look at and what is revealed.
Photography appears to be a privileged field for experimenting with the status of representation. From the exhaustion of the real towards abstraction to the reality of the virtual image generated by a so-called intelligent robot, the ambition of this exhibition is to show us how photographic artists work and envisage this question. Does re presentation still take the forms of the real and does it still make reference? In all cases, photography calls on our knowledge and experience, because re presenting means developing the particular qualities of a model or, more accurately, of an idea. The real is not necessarily what can be seen, ‘the real is what thwarts the game’ writes Alain Badiou, ‘the real is the moment when the semblant is more real than the real of which it is the real’, it is also, without doubt, envisaging the reality of what is not present in the visible of the photographic image and which is embodied or inspires in another way. To show in order to induce elsewhere.
Extract from the introductory text by Catherine Rebois
