WHITE SERIES / NATURE MORTE — COMESTIBLE — Alain Polo Nzuzi / New Viewing #43 curated by Mukenge/Schellhammer

WHITE SERIES / NATURE MORTE — COMESTIBLE

Alain Polo Nzuzi

New Viewings #43

Curated by Mukenge/Schellhammer

Installation views: Courtesy of New Viewings

The artistic work of Alain Polo Nzuzi integrates performance, sculpture, Voguing and elements from fashion. Under the artist’s name Belle Garçon, he explores the intimate, emancipating himself from the usual gender and masculine canons to invent himself as more fluid. His Project “White Series / Nature Morte – Comestible” explores the internet and its bodies of fantasy that is broadcast to millions of eyes around the world. The artist perceives a kind of love affair with these screen abstractions through the way in which its virtual users put so much of their flesh into digital format, creating an aestheticization of the bodies that elicit certain virtual interactions.

Alain Polo Nzuzi takes the images of these human bodies and rearranges them in a still life setting in order to give them a softness and to veil them without hiding them. Then he cuts them with a pair of scissors, like a caress – not a violence – and he creates a new world that makes these bodies even more desirable, edible: perfect fruits and vegetables – offered to everybody.

The white series are part of the project “Beaugocity”, a sketch of a utopian city: “A city, folded and unfolded – a flat city that becomes a relief and is filled with the bodies and faces of friends. Thousands of dreamed friends, some of whom become real, they all pose to make a city that only certain minds, certain people, accomplices and friends can see.It is a city whose objective reality does not exist. Only pleasure, the joy of living, counts. To feel better about yourself and to become a prince, a star, an icon: here the dream is allowed.”

Alain Polo Nzuzi was born in 1985 in the Democratic Republic of Congo and lives and works in Paris. He is a photographer and visual artist who studied at the Academy of Art in Kinshasa, from which he graduated in 2006.

Alain Polo develops an aesthetic practice combining sensuality and desire for the male body. In 2008–2009 he produced his first series of photographs in which he stages himself, performing his masculine, sensual and vulnerable image. Far from making his body the object of desire, he reveals himself to us as questioning the ways of seeing and considering the other.

Alain Polo Nzuzi was presented at Paris Photo in 2011 in the Revue Noire gallery. His work serie “Blanche” was presented at the Bamako photographic biennale in 2017, was selected among the winners of the fotofever prize in 2019 and exhibited at the Carrousel du Louvre.
Alain Polo Nzuzi presented his work in the collective exhibition “Almost Home” in the Rx gallery in Paris 2019, the “Familistère de Guise” alongside the artist Pume Bylex in 2021 as well as the New Distance virtual project organized by the Paris Jeu de Paume Museum / Jeu de Paume Lab in 2021. As a performer he appeared at the Abattoirs Muséum Toulouse in 2021 as part of the Revue noire exhibition, at the wasteland of Belle mai on the occasion of the Africa Fantastique 2021 and 2022 festival and at the international city of the arts in the Africa festival, “Performative Utopia”.

— Mukenge/Schellhammer

New Viewings

THE HIDDEN CORNERS OF MY NEURONS — Group Show at 93 Off-Space, Basel

NO NEED TO CELEBRATE — June Fischer at Hamlet, Zurich

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