The Centre d’art contemporain – Les Tanneries opens a new chapter in its programme with Seized by the Spirit, an exhibition by visual artist and filmmaker Vir Andres Hera, presented in the Verrière and the Petite Galerie until May 28, 2023.

The exhibition concludes the second cycle of a season entitled Les registres du jeu, extending a line of attention composed of assembled phases, contiguous moments, spaces, and propositions open to multiple forms of narration. Within this programmatic dynamic, one oriented toward travel and the entanglement of cultures, Vir Andres Hera’s work takes root in order to question systems of capture and to render visible once again territories and perceptions that have been obscured.

Born from a long-term body of work initiated in 2019, the exhibition is a polymorphous project developed through successive stages and partnerships. It reflects Vir Andres Hera’s poetic approach, in which processes of creation and exchange are neither linear nor chronological, but composite and anachronistic. By hosting what can only ever be an impossible “final” stage of production, the Centre d’art affirms a logic of itinerancy and collaboration, and reasserts its commitment to the geographies of production that shape contemporary creation. Presenting Vir Andres Hera’s work within its spaces also reactivates the Centre’s capacity to co-construct and host hybrid projects with complex modes of implementation, while demonstrating its support for emerging artistic practices.

The exhibition unfolds as a meeting between the artist and the site. A meeting attentive to spatial scale, technical specificities, and memory. In the Verrière, a large sheet of paper is deployed and opened toward the sky, recalling “paper-skins”. Suspended images appear, less as singular pictures than as fragments or photograms drawn from Misurgia Sisitlallan, reflecting the constant redefinition of form that runs through Vir Andres Hera’s practice. Multiple voices, languages, and sounds circulate through the space.

The logic of fragmentation emerges, is heard, then seen, refusing the signifiers of linear representation and historical narration. In the dimness of the Petite Galerie, the exhibition continues with Le Daftar: a multiversal, atemporal, and symbolic traversal by four characters moving through spaces marked by Western colonial and cultural imprints. Questioning what it means to form community and to live together, Vir Andres Hera draws the viewer into a complex and plural reality, impossible to grasp in its entirety, mirroring the diversity of genders, languages, and cultural affiliations the artist seeks to make visible. Echoing the approach of Meris Angioletti, the exhibition invites us to shed the representations that, like the blind spot of the eye, condition and limit our ability to perceive what remains invisible: other possible worlds.