Paris’ Maison de l’Amérique Latine hosts an exhibition by fifteen international artists—photos, installations, holograms, video projections— inspired by Argentinian writer Adolfo Bioy Casares’ science fiction novel “Morel’s Invention or The Image Machine,” published in 1940 (to July 21, 2018). The book—a contemplation of image, reality, immortality and love— has influenced generations of artists from Garcia Marquez to Robbe-Grillet’s scenario for “L’Année Derniere à Marienbad (1961).
In 2003 Masaki Fujihata, another artist inspired by Casares, created a video projection “Morel’s Panorama” for an exhibition at the Yanguchi Center in Japan. It is reconstructed for the current Maison de l’Amérique Latine exhibition. Fujhata’s work, a classic of interactive art, superimposes various elements both real and virtual in a multi video environment of rotating cylinders questioning our relationship with time and space.
This thought-provoking exhibition stretches between low tech illustrated by Stéphanie Solinas haunting cyanotypes made in Iceland to Michel Bret and Edmond Couchot’s high tech interactive computer-video installation “Les Pissenlits.” Pierrick Sorin’s “La derniére danse,”—an optical theater loop with hologram characters— created specially for the exhibition directly takes on one of the novel’s central questions: Can we fall in love with an image? The questions raised by “Morel’s Invention” are possibly more relevant to our “selfie culture” than to any audience since Casares wrote his book.
“Morel’s Invention or The Image Machine.” To July 21, 2018. Maison de l’Amérique Latine, 217, bd Saint Germain, 75007.