Photographier l’Action
Visual Memory, Performance, and Staging from 1970 to the Present 

Günter Brus, Hannah Collins, Emo de Medeiros, John Goto, Nicola Lo Calzo, Chantal Regnault et Sue Williamson

From a street in Vienna in 1970 to contemporary rituals in Benin, this exhibition explores how photography not only documents performance but also becomes its space, its trace, and sometimes even its very extension. Through the works of Günter Brus, Hannah Collins, Emo de Medeiros, John Goto, Nicola Lo Calzo, Chantal Regnault, and Sue Williamson, the exhibition demonstrates how, for more than fifty years, the photographic image has accompanied, shaped, and extended performative, political, ritual, and cultural gestures.

In 1970, during Wiener Spaziergang, Günter Brus walked through Vienna with his body painted in the colours of the Austrian flag. The action was ephemeral, scandalous, and almost impossible to grasp. It was the photographs that ensured its legacy, transforming a performative act into an icon of Viennese Actionism. With the KAM project, Nicola Lo Calzo explores the memories of resistance born from slavery through contemporary stagings. Here, photography does not simply record an event: it produces the action; it becomes the stage upon which invisible histories are reenacted. Performance becomes diffuse, embedded in everyday movements and circulations that the image brings to light. John Goto's photographic tableaux in High Summer recreate social and political scenes with an almost painterly precision. Staging becomes a critical tool through which photography constructs a performance conceived specifically for the image. In 1990, Chantal Regnault photographed the voguing balls of New York, capturing a performative culture that emerged on the margins, where identity is forged in the immediacy of the runway. Her photographs have become essential archives of a scene whose transmission has been ensured through photography. In Benin, Emo de Medeiros documents Vodun ceremonies in which ritual performance, ancestral memory, and contemporary realities converge. The image becomes a mediator between the visible and the invisible. With All Our Mothers, Sue Williamson stages the memory of South African women who resisted apartheid. Photography becomes a space of symbolic repair, where the performance of remembrance is reenacted before the camera. Finally, in Routes to Ferran Adrià, Hannah Collins stages the human, geographical, and economic networks that connect cuisine to its origins. Here again, performance becomes diffuse, embedded in the movements and everyday gestures that photography renders visible. By tracing an expanded history of performance through photography, the exhibition demonstrates that, from 1970 to the present day, photography has evolved from being a document of action to a tool of staging, and ultimately into the very space in which performance exists. It reveals how the still image can contain movement, politics, ritual, and intimacy, and how performance finds in photography an active memory rather than a simple record.

This exhibition is part of the Photographie dans les galeries d’art programme, organised by the Comité Professionnel des Galeries d’Art, the Centre national des arts plastiques, and the Centre Pompidou on the occasion of the Bicentenaire de la photographie and the Photodays fair.