L'Ahah, Rue Moret, Solo Show, Paris, 2018
in collaboration with L'Ahah Paris

The spiritual constellations
Text by Garance Chabert

Lena Amuat & Zoë Meyer lead us here into a world of duplication and uncertainty:
two spaces, cubes and mirrors, picture boxes, enigmatic objects, dazzling and colourful backgrounds. Would the playful setting, the pretense, and the mise en abyme be carefully arranged here and there to create a diversion? The title Artefakte und Modelle, again a duel, and which summarizes the entire work of Lena Amuat & Zoë Meyer, promises to be as serious as an algebra course at the University of Göttingen. And for good reason, the objects photographed by the Swiss duo over the past ten years are rooted in a history that could not be more respectable. The ancient style and its copies, mathematical and pedagogical modelling, animal specimens or ethnographic objects are sufficient to evoke in a quasi-generic way the classical sciences and humanities taught in the 19th and 20th centuries. Models and artifacts reflect the Western vision of an era that has a passion for education and inventory, flourishing in the encyclopedic project. This knowledge, which has been a long time - always? - authority, Lena Amuat & Zoë Meyer reproduce fragments of it, in photographs and installations where irreverence and invocation mingle.

The two artists photograph the objects as fragile relics, often damaged or dismembered by time and whose origin, history and value are unknown. They choose backgrounds that literally give them back colours, without giving up on an uncompromising portrait: front and camera shots, guaranteeing sharpness and accuracy. As they collect these neglected objects of European idealism, they add more recent items to their subjective collection, complicating the enigma of a millennial epic whose temporalities eventually telescoped: Lucky Strike‘s package of Mad Men talks to the Doric column of the inventors of democracy, the rules of photographic landmarks are negligently posed on the infinity of the International Blue Klein or Amor & Psyché are represented in the middle of a selfie session. The exposure and equivalence of these few symbols of universalist and patriarchal society operates as a pleasing demystification. The sharing in the installation entails the crucial time of invocation, as defined by Jan Verwoert in a text on appropriation practices at the beginning of the 21st century: what performative gestures should be put in place to summon these ghost signs, stripped of their heuristic and heroic value but still nimbed with their past aura? It is here that the staging of a spiritualist decor is played out, and the interest of the traps, false mirrors and double bottoms.
The hanging favours instability, movement, blur between the second and third dimensions, often reinforced by an angled display (the beautiful corner of the icon), dramatic lighting, and recently shimmering surfaces. If you like turntables and spectra that converse, then magic can work.
As far as I am concerned, Lena Amuat & Zoë Meyer‘s installations make some great minds that are dear to me swirl in the atmosphere: that of Hippolyte Bayard (1801-1887), master of staging, in the way of matching a curtain to an antique statuette and making objects dance from one shot to the next; of Man Ray (1890-1976) of course whose surrealist eye knew how to magnificently capture the plastic potential of mathematical objects; Finally, that of the mystic Aby Warburg (1866-1929), and the plates of his atlas, well named „Mnemosyne“, in this very contemporary way, iconographer and astronomer, to revive in unexpected constellations the expressiveness of representations of
the past.

L'Ahah