Joëlle Van Autreve: Capturing the Uncanny
To reveal. Not to conceal. That's what she's all about. Since Joelle Van Autreve, after studying three-dimensional art at School of Arts/KASK in Gent, had finally entered into a collaboration with a fashion photographer, she had at the end of the sessions, she says casually, urged the models to throw off those clothes. With what had happened there at the end it had started.
A decade later, in which she also became the mother of two daughters, she has -especially in the last two years- built up an impressive photographic oeuvre, which she is now showing in an exhibition for the first time. Almost invariably nudes are central to her images. But what she wants to expose is not so much the bodies of those models, let alone that she wants to portray them as Objects of Desire. What she rather wants to capture is that sultry subcutaneous tone that she describes in words as malaise, and comes close to what was labeled Unheimlich and Uncanny by Sigmund Freud and others. And why the nudity? “Because it is simply much more powerful to see an angry woman walking around naked than dressed.”
She never limits herself to a quick snapshot of reality as it presents itself to her. There is always a staging that precedes photographing, in which everything - the location, the characters, whatever- is recorded in advance with almost maniacal precision. However, in doing so she deliberately chooses what she describes as atypical locations, rough and raw, wet and cold, unpleasant. Situations that bring the models out of balance, out of their comfort zone. This also applies to the guidelines and watchwords that she unleashes on the models, and with which she wants to convey to them what is troubling or fascinating her at that moment. Words like: denial, lie, illusion. Or simply the question to act as if they each had to do it with one leg less.
Her models bring up the intense dialogue that Joelle then enters into with them, what makes working with her so fascinating and unique. Her photo shoots always shape themselves into a collaborative process. And yet one cannot escape the impression that - although she never physically figures in her photos - these are largely self-portraits. This may explain why she only photographs women, never men. And why most of them - floating in the limbo between girl and woman, or girl and boy- bear such a resemblance to her and each other, as if they were an alter ego.
Even when she wants to capture moments of euphoria and happiness, she says, of symbiosis too, there is always 'that crazy dark undertone'. Which brings us to the question of whether she is familiar with the theory of the Uncanny, as developed by Ernst Jensch and Sigmund Freud more than a century ago, and which more recently was even linked by Sadeq Rahimi with the leitmotiv of the double, twin, and alter ego, as it appears in her photos? Not really, she says. Barely heard of it. Yet many of her photos can be read as illustrations of the discourse on these complex concepts, that express the highly current and frightening unease of something that seems familiar and alienating at the same time, sometimes of irresistible beauty and yet shocking,scary, creepy or grimy, and that according to Freud is pushed to the surface unconsciously, by the forbidden and repressed impulses of our Id.
This kinship also extends into the three works by Van Autreve that curator Emilie Dujat has selected for this group exhibition in the Cultural Centre of Ukkel, and which together span almost a decade. While the character in the oldest photo, Untitled, resembles a doll in her elasticity, at the same time alienating and familiar, the second work - based on a dream of the photographer- is even called Doll, another key concept in the discourse about the Uncanny. But the relationship is even more striking in the latest work, Femme Aveugle, showing a blindfolded naked woman, which in Freud’s Das Unheimliche is discussed as a sign for the fear of castration and the loss of sexuality. The fact that Van Autreve has reinvented the Uncanny on her own in this way is already highly remarkable. But what's more: where the discourse was almost exclusively dominated by men for almost a century, who spoke somewhat sedately about the Uncanny in others, including women, these wild images finally give the floor to the opposite sex, a woman who - without male intermediaries - gives free rein to the Uncanny in herself and other women.
The three works that Emilie Dujat chose also show the enormous evolution that her work has undergone within a decade. Untitled (2015) largely complies with the rules that still prevail in the genres mostly associated with portraying women, fashion and nude photography: the image is determined by sharp, clear contours, and by a loud interplay of smooth, primary color areas. Just like in Doll (2020), the focus is on the body, while the light comes almost crushingly from one direction: the eye of the photographer, who imposes her will. In Femme Aveugle (2013), however, the light is diffuse, soft, and seems to come from all sides. It rhythmically moves the background, which now comes into the foreground, determined by soft, earthy colors. The flat areas of color were painterly replaced by spots and smudges, subtly dipped in a chiaroscuro. Contours disappear, also from the body, that is almost swallowed up by that shrouded background. In other recent work the body even resolutely steps away from the florid image. The focus on the object – the body- has expanded to include painting a situation, that takes on a life of its own. As if Van Autreve handed things over more freely and wanted to impose her vision less a priori. And she thus also seems to have found a much richer and nuanced language, in which she can also better give a platform to the elusive and mysterious of the Uncanny.
Throughout the decade time she has, parallel to her photographic work, also made short videos. There has also been an evolution there. In the most recent video, which is significantly called Malaise, one of the French words closest to Uncanny, the characters do not so much enter into dialogue with her but with each other. It is a silent dialogue, purely physical, in which a power game plays a decisive role. In a recent photo series this power game even literally turns into a struggle. Referring to this subcutaneous violence in her work the artist Pascal Bernier already quoted Rainer Maria Rilke in 2014: “Das Schöne ist nichts anders als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen” – “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are barely able to endure.” That famous quote is still applicable to her work. Over the years terror or what Jacques Lacan described in his analysis of the Uncanny as the 'territory of fear’, looms more and more emphatically and intensely in her images. Nevertheless, her main aim remains also that feeling of euphoria and exuberant joy, happiness even, which she also strives for during the collaborative process with her models, and allowing her to conjure up and sublimate that terror with beauty. It is this opposition – next to others - which makes her work so interesting.
Max Borka
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Thank you,
Joëlle Van Autreve