
The Disclosed Hammam - Mediterranean Hammams, from Damas to Marseille

Photographs by Anna Puig Rosado and Pascal Meunier
Centre Iris
http://www.centre-iris.fr
238, rue Saint Martin
75003 Paris
Téléphone : 01 48 87 06 09
Entrée libre
"the RealParisian.com - Openings & Vernissages" blog is your ultimate guide to exclusive gallerie previews, groundbreaking avant-garde and contemporary artist's vernissage in Paris. You’ve already been to Paris once, twice, maybe even ten times before and this time your mind is made up: you are going to spend your next stay not just as a visitor, but in true Parisian style! Suivez le guide...
The Disclosed HammamMediterranean Hammams , from Damas to Marseille - Opening December 18th, 2007


RINEKE DIJKSTRA:"Park Portraits"Reception Friday December 07th 2007
Following a fantastic traveling retrospective of her work, Rineke Dijkstra has recently unveiled her latest project - a new series of portraits of young people photographed, in city parks of the world, in which the artist's lens majestically captures life and the nuances of timeless rites of passage, and of identity, in medias res, an updated, modern album of magical woodland creatures. 'Park portraits', on show at the Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris, include images of schoolchildren and adolescents engaged in the rituals of their daily life, whether it be playing, socialising, resting, thinking, in city parks in Europe, China and the United States.
It's interesting that of all the portraits, varied as they are in focus and expression, not a single one is in what is known as a 'portrait' format. Using the lush framework of traditional landscape in a seemingly offhand manner echoes part of the sense of Dijkstra's latest images of youth - the natural and inevitable merging of two subjects, both personal and universal, which are in a state of constant change, and for which there is a longstanding artistic fascination to converse with and overturn. Writing about the park portraits in a Dutch daily newspaper during the time of the Stedelijk show, Kees Keijer wrote: 'Dijkstra let go of her former austerity and photographed four young people in Amsterdam during a "Dejeuner sur l'herbe anno 2005". Again the work is frontal, but now the pose is relaxed. The surroundings in Dijkstra's work used to be extremely sober; now, candy wrappings and empty soft drink bottles are lying about. A gaping rucksack zipper offers a nearly symbolic perspective on a different reality: one of homework, commitments and expectations for the future. But they don't want to think about that just now'.
The new body of work is slightly more playful than Dijkstra's previous, rather more austere series documenting the rites of passage of adolescence and childhood, from the 'Beach Portraits' of 1992, to the video installation 'Buzzclub/Mysterworld' (1996-1997), the 'Tiergarten Series' (1998-2000), 'Israeli soldiers' (1999-2000), and the single-subject portraits in serial transition: 'Almerisa' (1994-2005), 'Shany' (2001-2003) and 'Olivier' (2000-2003). In 'Park portraits', the portrait seems to shape the subject's possession of their own identity, now performing for us in a new, uncontrollable theatre of characters, safe in the comfort of their favorite spot.City and transparencies - Adrienne Arth photographiesOpening Saturday November 24th from 06pm

Legs, feet, bodies, faces, stolen moves on a metro exit, in a building reflection, in a train... We're witnessing a dislocation, a ripping of the reality. A sudden roar burst, a town is appearing: Paris, scarefied with humans, lives, traces... Photographs becomes a game of matters and shapes of many layers. The human being becomes a shape in space, a fulcrum where the eye stops and bounce back. In her work, the abstraction look is dominating, but also a definitive modern approach and a more radical photogrphic aesthetic.
Mirror, mirror on the wall...Opening on Saturday November 24th at the Galerie du Lucernaire
3 photographers…
Paul Muse is born in England in 1960. Photographer since he is eleven year old. After some litterature, Photo and cinema studies, he briefly worked in advertising before leaving the country for a two year stay in Sudan, then Portugal for 3 years. Moving to Paris in 1990, he since devoted himself to street photography and published his first solo exhibition in 1996. Since the summer of 2006, he works on the "Today" project, a daily newspaper in pictures and words, published on his website.
Frances Ryan settled down in Paris after years spent wandering around the world. It is only when she discovered the work of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston she decided to work exclusively in black and white. She runs through Paris, her city of adoption, to share with us the hidden secrets and her personnal vision of the city.
After studying Spanish litterature and Art History in Madrid and Paris, Laurence Toussaint worked for about 10 years at the contemporary art library Artcurial. Passionate for photography, she specialized in gardens and landscape and illustrate books about the wonders of nature.
Xavier Zimbardo. The apparitions' geniusOpening on November 28th, 2007 at the Albert Benamou Gallerie
Since he escaped, twenty years ago, the verb archipelago where his teaching profession restricted him in order to give full time to his role as image creator, Xavier Zimbardo reported from his vagabondages through continents and worlds a stunning collection of photographic works. Nothing to do with documentaries cliches, anecdotal, quaint or exotic pictures. Each of his images has to be seen as an apparition, where the share of imagination, random effects and the inspirationnal impromptu haunt the scope of reality.
Whether views, scenes, portraits, this flash from another world make the snapshot iridescent. The aim of the artist is not to duplicate what he technically has under the eyes, but to subjectively produce what makes, from the bottom of his eye to the abbyss of the hypothalamus, the singular illumination of the captured image. From the shoot to the impression, through work on negative or the screen every Zimbardo's work is as accomplished as a dance on your optic nerve. Always with a need to dive his focal, mental, libidinal objective beyond visible, inviting our gaze to bear on the side of the wandering soul of things, living and worlds. That earned him the title of shaman photographer.

Fantasy - What Ever Happened to Your Dreams ?Opening Saturday Novembre 24th at Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire
The English term "Fantasy", which means both fantasy and the fantastic, serves as a guide to the exhibition What Ever Happened to Your Dreams ?
Erotical object and advetising privileged target, the child is often represented in contemporary art including photography and video. Adults (author or spectators of the image) have a tender and terrible glance to his World: sometimes seen as a double or a radical self, a mysterious being sometime hostile and cruel, nevertheless fragile and vulnerable, the child lives in a perfect or fantasy world where adults are projecting their fantasies.
The childlike universe, lures associated with an idyllic, fantastic or nightmarish virtuality, ideally takes shape in a fairy tale aesthetic. It is often referred to as a kind of lost Eden where fears and dangers, monsters and evil are hiding behind a prettiness display. It is that phantasmagoria that can be found in popular images.
The title of the exhibition at Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire: "What ever happened to your dreams?" is a direct reference to the 1960's Henry Farrell book adapted for the movies by Robert Aldrich in 1962, "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" It introduces the concepts of fantasy and duality between romance and terror, between purity and evil, embodied in the film by an aging Bette Davis locked in her child's wishes and lust for eternal youth, struggling with the perversity of Joan Crawford. This exhibition will put the emphasis on pieces illustrating the loss and the overwhelming desire for adults to preserve their dreams.
PARIS PHOTO OR THE EYE OF THE WORLDOpening Nov. 14th - 19h to 22h (by invitation only) at the Carrousel du Louvre
Lumen18Opening october 31st, 2007 - 07:00pm
With his "Already-made" series, David Cousin-Marsy reveals, through his gaze, unexpected art objects in an over-urban, bland and lonely world and pimp up our ordinary view. This very same urban environment is the setting to a walking dream by Benjamin Josset, who makes associations in his series "Rencontre" (Encounters). Emilie Juillet as for her, set up an inventory of emotion trigged by her environment. She collect faces, details, moments which become as many "Human Nature(s)". Those 3 photographers share with us the light they see in our surrounding world. 
G A O B R O T H E R Svernissage on Wednesday October 24th,2007 @ Albert Benamou Gallerie
