The three projects brought together this year at the Galerie du Crous offer a poetic take on the geopolitical issues and power dynamics running through today's world, where present-day tensions quietly shape people's lives. At the heart of these photographic explorations, water runs through the narratives as a connecting thread.
Guillaume Bihan and Daria Svertilova travel along the banks of the Danube as far as Ukraine to portray a generation of young people whose future remains uncertain. These transitional figures, suspended between childhood and adulthood, embody both solitude and a sense of belonging to the strange worlds they pass through.
Daphné Nan Le Sergent weaves a dialogue between the evolution of images and that of territories that have become strategic to the global semiconductor industry: Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. In these places, where mastery of digital technology has become a major geopolitical stake, data has taken on a value as a resource comparable to water. The artist develops visual, sonic, and poetic analogies that question new forms of circulation, power, and dependency.
Clément Chapillon turns his gaze to the Dead Sea, a place steeped in millennia of history, where Palestinians and Israelis come to immerse themselves, escaping their own weight for a moment and undergoing a physical experience that briefly suspends the region's fractures. Yet it is a sea that is inexorably receding, leaving on its shores, its landscapes, and its images the traces of its disappearance.
Galerie du Crous de Paris
A longstanding institution on rue des Beaux-Arts, Galerie du Crous de Paris hosts around twenty solo and group exhibitions each year. Dedicated to supporting emerging artists, it develops partnerships with higher education institutions and the art world to promote student creativity and make art and culture accessible to all.
Cnap
A public institution under the authority of the French Ministry of Culture, Cnap supports and fosters contemporary creation and, on behalf of the French State, develops a national collection of more than 108,000 works, which it preserves and makes widely accessible through loans and exhibitions in France and abroad. Comprising more than 15,000 works, its photography collection reflects the diversity of practices and the transformations of the medium since the advent of modernism.
Throughout the year, Cnap also supports photographers, artists and authors at every stage of their practice, from research to the production of new work, through twelve dedicated funding programmes. Among these, its documentary photography programme provides artists and authors with the resources to develop a project from the initial research and experimentation phase through to the production of the final works.