Exhibitions

Associated to Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles

Carré d’Art-Musée d’Art Contemporain de Nîmes joins forces for the first time with the Rencontres de la Photographie event in Arles to present Stéphanie Solinas’s Dominique Lambert project. The artist will also have a presence in Arles with the exhibition La Méthode des lieux at the Cloître Saint-Trophime.

“Dominique is the most popular mixed-gender first name in France, it is also the twenty-seventh commonest forename; combined with Lambert, which is the twenty-seventh commonest last name. So I defined my survey population as being the hundred and ninety-one Dominique Lamberts listed in the phone book (the French white pages). After collating various analyses relating to the characterology of the first name Dominique, I mailed each of the Dominique Lamberts asking them to do a personality test and a Chinese portrait. I used the Chinese portraits that came back to draw up a written portrait, with the help of the Dominique Lambert Description Advisory Committee (comprising a psychologist, a statistician, a police inspector, a legal expert, and a visual ID consultant). On the basis of this document, the painter Benoît Bonnemaison-Fitte drew a portrait. His drawing was then turned into an Identikit picture by Dominique Ledée, who is a police investigator working in this field. I then cast around for a close resemblance to the photo-fit picture, to take a photograph. A sealed envelope containing the passport photograph of the (male) Dominique Lambert who wrote the Chinese portrait closes the chain of depictions.” Stéphanie Solinas

Implementing the various different techniques used by officialdom to represent a person’s identity, involving experts, and proceeding in successive stages, Stéphanie Solinas explores and exhausts the system and tools of representation itself.

The Carré d’Art exhibition for the first time deploys the full set of faces in this sample of people, taking the viewer on a tour of the worlds of Dominique Lamberts, to experience the distance between the clichés of representation and the irreducible quality of uniqueness. 

Exhibition curator: Paula Aisemberg

Film of the exhibition : interview of Stephanie Solinas

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