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Lumières à Laignes
Angela Bulloch

Mediator - Xavier Douroux
Supporters - Commune of Laignes, Leader II European Initiative, SISECO, Fondation de France
Laignes, Bourgogne, France, 2002

As part of the Circuit des Lumières, the patrons wanted to develop and enhance the commune of Laignes and the centre of its villages. Artist Angela Bulloch juxtaposed three coloured screens over the stretch of water, thus marking out the area by illuminating it. In the garden, she placed three very plain benches along the banks of the Laignes River, thereby structuring the space by forming a line parallel to the shore – inviting the passer-by. Through the interplay of the rectangular planes, the benches and screens resonate with one another. For the street furniture and screens on the water, the artist used the three pop colours that are emblematic of her work: red, green and blue.

Three coloured screens are juxtaposed over the stretch of water, and mark out the area by illuminating it. In the garden, three benches with an understated design typical of a certain international functionalism are placed along the River Laignes, structuring the space by a line parallel to the stretch of water – an invitation to passers-by. The benches and screens echo one another through the interplay of the rectangular planes. For the street furniture and her intervention on the stretch of water, Bulloch again uses the three pop colours that typify her work: red, green and blue. An abstract work inscribed on to a real space, Bulloch's creation draws attention in a detached manner to the sociological issues of a special kind of modernism, restoring a contemporary dimension to them.

Angela Bulloch

The mediator suggested bringing in Angela Bulloch with whom he had already collaborated, particularly in the context of a solo exhibition at the Le Consortium art centre in 1997, the artist's first retrospective. She has been active since the late 1980s, creating works that require the viewer to play an active role. She questions the validity of the binary systems that have been crucial in a certain understanding of the world throughout modernity. One of her first works is still emblematic of her creative work today: two luminous globes where the light never travels round simultaneously (a disrupted binary system) create an optical stimulus that contributes towards destabilising viewers' perceptions. Her recent installations make the process more complex by creating interactions at many levels between sound, light, drafting machines, etc.