SILVER LINING – SARAH-ANAÏS DESBENOIT

Silver Lining
An exhibition by Sarah-Anaïs Desbenoit
Opening on Saturday 7 October from 4pm to 9pm
From 7 October to 25 November 2023 at the Ygrec-ENSAPC Art Center
+ Evening visit on 24 November

Silver Lining is the first solo exhibition by Sarah-Anaïs Desbenoit, who graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure de Paris-Cergy in 2020. Coinciding with the Night Stalker exhibition at Le Fresnoy – Studio National d’art Contemporain in Tourcoing, which is staged in the dark, Silver Lining promises a shimmer of shadow. Designed specifically for the Ygrec-ENSAPC Art Center, the exhibition takes its title from the expression ‘every cloud has a silver lining’, which suggests that every cloud contains the promise of the sun to come. Bathed in a misty atmosphere, a vast installation combines sculptural, light and sound elements. Together, they create a landscape in motion, oscillating between miniature art and human scale. An expanse of water swells up with tears dripping one by one, a miniature train moves without destination, a funfair wheel grafted onto a windmill spins in the haze… Like an ASMR* sculpture – intended to lull us into a form of hypnosis – the installation plays on repetition and the gradual alteration of our sensations. Inspired by personal memories, cinematographic panoramas and actual architecture, this landscape is above all a fantasised reconstruction, designed to give rise to a wide spectrum of fictions. The artist offers an ‘architectural fable’, its childlike tone tinged with melancholy. In reference to dioramas, but also to the entertainment industry, which attracts all generations, from funfairs to toy trains, Silver Lining is a theatre without performers, animated by mechanisms that turn in a loop.

Born in Paris, Sarah-Anaïs Desbenoit graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure de Paris-Cergy in 2020 before joining Le Fresnoy, the National Contemporary Art Studio in Tourcoing. Fuelled by long-term research – developed in particular during a residency at the Oasis de Thigmert in the Moroccan desert and an internship at Villa Kujoyama in Japan – her work focuses on the mechanisms by which images appear and disappear, and their influence on memory and cognition. Through the production of miniatures and the use of video, projection and sound, her practice develops around the question of illusion and sublimated disorder. Sarah-Anaïs Desbenoit regularly teams up with other artists in a collaborative approach. Carpenter Mathilin Bernard, programmer Guillaume Stagnaro and musician and composer Octave Magescas worked alongside her to develop Silver Lining.

*ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) is a pleasant, tingling or shivering sensation in the skull, scalp or peripheral areas of the body in response to a visual, auditory, olfactory or cognitive stimulus.

Image: View of the exhibition Silver Lining, 2023, Sarah-Anaïs Desbenoit, Centre d’Art Ygrec-ENSAPC, Aubervilliers. Photos: Sarah-Anaïs Desbenoit