Photo credits: Les Migrants, Mathieu Pernot, 2009
Exhibition by Mathieu Pernot, artist in residence, and Mohamed Abakar, photographer
Opening on Friday June 8, 2018 from 6 pm to 8 pm in the Foyer of the Collège de France at 11, place Marcelin-Berthelot - 75005 Paris
The exhibition can be viewed freely when the rooms are open for lectures
Press kit
Mathieu Pernot discovered Mohamed Abakar's work during the group exhibition Vitrines de l'Atelier des artistes en exil hosted by the Ministry of Culture in 2018 and presented in the windows of the Palais Royal. Presented alongside other work by refugees, the photographs taken by Mohamed Abakar in the gardens of the Château de Versailles show sculptures covered in fabric to protect them from the winter cold. These images caught the eye of Mathieu Pernot, who recognized in them an aesthetic and symbolic kinship with his own 2009 work on migrants photographed sleeping, their bodies wrapped in sheets. The point of view of a young Sudanese migrant, confronted with a place of memory in the history of France, seems to respond to that of the French photographer showing the bodies of migrants on the sidewalks of Paris.
This exhibition establishes a dialogue between the two series, questioning our ability to imagine what is hidden from us. It raises the question of the photographed subject and the history of those who make the images. Two photographers' lives intersect, and are brought together here for the first time. This exhibition is the first step in a series of works that the two authors hope to carry out together.
