Born in 1968 and 1969 respectively, Christophe Berdaguer and Marie Péjus live in Marseille and Paris.
They have had several personal exhibitions (Villa Arson, Nice, 1997; FRAC PACA, Marseille, 2001; Lieu Unique, Nantes, 2006; FRAC Basse-Normandie, Caen, 2007; Circuit, Lausanne, 2010).
They have also participated in numerous group exhibitions (Subréel, MAC, Marseille, 2002; Communauté 1 et 2, Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne, 2004; Dreamtime, Musée des Abattoirs, Toulouse, 2009).
Christophe Berdaguer and Marie Péjus explore the interactions between brain, body, environment and constructed space, materialised by varied forms (volumes, projections, hybrid constructions, etc.).
Their phenomenological reflection on space and the psyche, on a biological relation with the world, draws on various fields (psychoanalysis, neurology, architecture, parapsychology, etc.) treated by the artists in a both deep and distanced manner. Drawing inspiration from the counter-utopias of radical Italian architects and designers, Berdaguer & Péjus perform mental transpositions of architecture. The mental landscapes created incorporate behavioural changes caused by psychological disturbances, the taking of chemical substances or the effect of stimuli on our senses.
The artists thus use the links generated between environmental space and states of awareness to construct projects concerning a body, whether individual or socialised, human, plant, animal or mineral, that is subjected to various transformation processes.
The Berdaguer & Péjus exhibition at the Institut d’art contemporain reactivates existing works and includes a large number of new ones. The artists have chosen to use the entire exhibition space, considering it as a research area showing the various fields that they address and highlighting the analogy between the artistic creation process and the functioning of the cerebral structure.
The artists have created multi and infrasensorial zones of experience for their project at the Institute. They use disturbances of perception for new developments in their exploration of language, time and memory.
They transpose and order experiments that are sometimes invisible to the naked eye or experienced without our realising it, that question a way of being in the world—sometimes addictive, sometimes supernatural—that hovers between pathological fiction and curative reality.
This polysemous work—like the name of the exhibition, Insula—awards an active dimension to the visitor and is aimed at giving form to escape hypotheses. Representing what is not visible, translating latent phenomena and multiplying keys for understanding come down to the production of both biopolitical and aesthetic deconditioning situations.
The research conducted by Berdaguer & Péjus plays on modified states of awareness and is aimed at materialising biological and physical continuity between cerebral activity and the outside world. In this respect, it can be linked in part to the activities of the IAC’s Laboratory Space Brain.
1 Berdaguer & Péjus in 2012 :
• 11 April to 29 July 2012. Exhibition: Les Maîtres du désordre, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris. Curator : Jean de Loisy.
• 3 May to 8 July 2012. Exhibition: Ciudad total, IVAM, Valencia, Spain. Curator : José Miguel Cortés.
• Summer 2012. Gue(ho)st House, public commission in Delme by the Ministry of Culture and Communication.
• Autumn 2012. Berdaguer & Péjus at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Supervised by Jean de Loisy.
