Salomé Engel

Salomé shapes trapped spaces. When she enters a room, she shifts symbols and disrupts timelines. She knows how to add a moon to the landscape, remove another from view and turn what lies off-screen into the realm of all possibilities. Behind a red curtain, she conceals the evidence of an event that never took place. She could hide an entire world in an eggshell. At L’Abri, she wishes to work on a very large scale: the bigger it is, the more convincing the lie becomes.

Salomé Engel is a multidisciplinary artist who, through sculpture, installation art and painting, explores systems of representation, value systems and normative logics that shape our perception of reality. Her work seeks to reveal the flaws in these constructs and to create spaces where alternative relationships with the world become conceivable, transforming the exhibition into a space for experimentation, for challenging assumptions and for inventing new possibilities.

She explores the tensions between context, fiction and materiality by creating a dialogue between objects, narratives, materials, spaces and events.

Drawing on concepts such as liminality, heterotopia, obsolescence and anachronism, her practice involves decontextualisation and recontextualisation, thereby revealing the latent strangeness of everyday life and the ambiguities of the systems that organise it.

Through simple gestures and sensitive spatial arrangements, she seeks to establish an altered logic in which the poetic emerges from the prosaic. Her installations explore relationships between presence and absence, thresholds, anticipation and emptiness, placing the spectator in a position that oscillates between that of a voyeur, a participant and an initiator.

Both romantic and critical, her work flirts with the absurd and fantasy in order to better examine the mechanisms of legitimisation, collective conventions, and the way in which materials, bodies and spaces generate meaning autonomously.