Scary Monsters!
AN OFF-BEAT LOOK INTO MONSTERS IN CINEMA
Marc Atallah and Frédéric Jaccaud
Alternative genres such as science fiction, fantasy or utopia spawn stories that feed surprising reservoirs of images. Contemporary memory delves into them without preconceived ideas, shining a light on its fears and fantasies.
For example, genre cinema abounds with weird works that engender certain myths of modernity. The cinematographic framework features ironic, outrageous landscapes and situations. The depiction of difference assumes all its value in this over-the-top system. Decadent characters—giants, vampires, zombies, extra-terrestrials, mythological creatures, abnormal and deformed beings— move about amongst humans the best they can. Their awkward bodies are the archetypes of a continuously redefined world.
The Scary Monsters! exhibition confronts us with the idea of the norm, the relational foundations that make us part of a group or separate us from it. Eschewing the clinical process of a learned bestiary, it is based not on demonstration but on monstration. The goal is to address the visual means set up by the photographic space in order to create the monster, thereby exposing not just the gestures and the gaze the monster itself provokes, but also the gestures and the gaze that make up the monster.
The show’s approach is not limited to the contemplation of abnormality, but also asks us to visit the fringes of what tends to make us more or less human.
