Website map

Website map

Hôtel West End

© Hôtel West End
© Hôtel West End

West End Hotel

2022

31 Promenade des Anglais, 06000 Nice

As in 2021, the West End Hotel will host the Prix OVNi Sud Emergence to reward emerging artists from the PACA region. 14 artists have been selected following a call for projects launched in January 2022. 

This program is a unique opportunity to discover the future leading artists of video art and contemporary art in a creative and dynamic atmosphere. 

 

Between TV monitors taken out of outdated rooms and touch screens, emerging artists invade a floor of the West End Hotel and loudly display their belonging to the Southern region. Their works gathered in this traditional hotel on the Promenade des Anglais testify to a need to account for a Magma constitutive of the artist’s thought where everything is continuously mixed and affected. References stored on the shelves, tried and tested classics, scattered materials, contemporary or borrowed forms, images of external, family and intimate environments… in short, constitute an inexhaustible stock of data to be taken into account, manipulated and assembled with the aim of creating new stories with the snippets of the old. 

 

Both a synthesis and an extension of our surrounding worlds, the Emergences exhibition relates a current event in progress that tends to repair, renew or replace what once existed and constitutes tomorrow. 

 

This exhibition is thus a witness to the video art of a new generation that reveals a common aesthetic, well anchored in its territory.

Free access. 

 

L’idée, série ¿Pintura pa’que?, 2021 © Daniel Barbaut Cámara
L’idée, série ¿Pintura pa’que?, 2021 © Daniel Barbaut Cámara

Daniel Barbaut Cámara

¿Pintura pa’que?

2021/2022 - In a loop - Color

Vidéo 1 | L’idée
Vidéo 2 | Floraison de celle-ci

 

“Why paint this thing that I have in front of me when it already exists and that even by arriving at an unprecedented realism it is impossible for me to transcribe identically. Playing on a humorous note if this all comes to nothing, why not make it even more absurd and paint on the thing I’m trying to paint. From there this project started: “¿Pintura pa’que? (Painting for What?)

 

¿Pintura pa’que? questions the point of view of the spectator by dictating that it is impossible to transcribe reality as it is. Everyone has their own, there is no universal reality that could be reproduced. By covering the installation with a new layer of paint, I appropriate it by imposing my reality on that of others. The installation no longer has a common appearance to all but only has one specific, mine, my point of view.

 

From this same reflection of appropriation, ¿Pintura pa’que? responds to personal questions of identity by questioning the relationship to nationalism and patriotism in our societies. Coming from three historically rival cultures, Spanish, Catalan and French, I have never had or understood these feelings of belonging. By covering the installation with a new coat of paint, I make it mine and I create a space that belongs to me.

 

 Instagram

La pluie a traversé mes vêtements, 2022 © Stéphanie Brossard, Adagp, Paris, 2022
La pluie a traversé mes vêtements, 2022 © Stéphanie Brossard, Adagp, Paris, 2022

Stéphanie Brossard

La pluie a traversé mes vêtements

2022 - 1'55" - Color

« The rain went through my clothes » is a short video where a character evolves in a tropical scenery. During this walk we follow a young girl pacing through the rain. Strange noises are rythming her journey. Dogs barking further away, the sound of a rooster crow, all those elements will drive the character into a mystical wandering.

 

Instagram

Poang, série Le Conformiste, 2019 © Emile Copello
Poang, série Le Conformiste, 2019 © Emile Copello

Emile Copello

Le Conformiste

2019/2021 - Color

Video 1 | Poang
Video 2 | Champion

 

The Conformist is the character played by Emile Copello. 

A standard male individual whose capacity of duplication is unlimited. Well behaved; the performance in order to stay inside the frame is endless and seems to itch the protagonist sometimes.Until now he stands still.

 

The armchair, the body and the television are summed in an all-in-once object. The show turns around on himself and the lonely individual watching it is unveiled.

 

Site internet | Instagram

Tornerò, 2022© Léonard Contramestre & Clémence Elman
Tornerò, 2022© Léonard Contramestre & Clémence Elman

Clémence Elman & Léonard Contramestre

Tornerò

2022 - 15’54’’ - Color

This is the story of a film which has only cost 37 euros. The price of a beige velvet suit found on a flea market and a pair of santiags bought on internet.

 

This film questions the inability to develop a narrative. By borrowing from the cinema – through references and technical processes – well known and stereotyped narrative patterns, but without ever proposing a precise scenario, the film constantly stutters and keeps the viewer in a spatio-temporal loop that freezes the story. A man gets out of a car and enters a hotel. From this simple pitch, the film integrates the multiple possible narrative choices and the hesitations as to the arrangement of the shots, the form ends up guiding the content.

 

Instagram Clémence Elman | Instagram Léonard Contramestre

Stabbat Metro, 2022 © Alexandre Espagnol
Stabbat Metro, 2022 © Alexandre Espagnol

Alexandre Espagnol

Stabbat Metro

2022 - Color

« Stabbat Metro » is the scene of an esoteric cult that has just carried out a fatal ritual in its chapel located in a forgotten room under the subway. 

 

Instagram

Grande bouche, série -Réalités, 2022 © Kiana Hubert-Low, courtesy CLKL
Grande bouche, série -Réalités, 2022 © Kiana Hubert-Low, courtesy CLKL

Kiana Hubert-Low

- réalités

2022 - Color

Video 1 | Grande bouche
Video 2 | Kiana, 21 ans, étudiante
Video 3 | Selfie mode

 

As a distorting mirror, reality television shows me an image of reality. Empathy, envy, rejection, dreaming… What do TV and social networks convey ? What do the media tell about me, about my generation, about French society and how to situate myself as a spectator ? Through makeup and editing, I reappropriate bodies and images. In this era of drama, egotrip and filters, amongst these unrealistic yet so familiar representations of women, I look for intimacy where poetry and apparent vulgarity meets.

 

Instagram

Râ226, la demi-vie des particules, Série _ Râ226, 2019 © Corentin Laplanche Tsutsui
Râ226, la demi-vie des particules, Série _ Râ226, 2019 © Corentin Laplanche Tsutsui

Corentin Laplanche Tsutsui

Râ226

2019 - 30’00" - Couleur

« Ladies & gentlemen, may I have your attention ». A voice seizes Saclay Nuclear Research Center’s speakers. Micro-fictions takes place in the ruins of the Cyclotron and HW3, the nuclear reactor – haunted by the ghosts of Irene & Frederic Joliot-Curie. The architecture inspires the narrative as well as it wears the symptoms of the ideology from which it has been formed. A rationalist temple built by the pope of rational classicism, Auguste Perret. Through critical fascination it shows how ideology build a construct of forms. Here, within the frame of postwar propaganda – this national narrative of which science and research were fundaments – which somewhen take fictional forms, from myths to science-fiction.

Very active on my Geiger counter, 2022 © Laurence Mercle, courtesy UMPRUM Praha
Very active on my Geiger counter, 2022 © Laurence Mercle, courtesy UMPRUM Praha

Laurence Merle

Very active on my Geiger counter

2022 - 17'09" - Color

 

The video « Very active on my Geiger counter » talks about Autunite.

 

Autunite is a stone who was discovered in 1800 by Joseph-François de Champeaux in the Autunian basin. In a way, it is Superman’s Kryptonite: radioactive and fluorescent to UV light. At that time, before Marie Curie extracted and discovered uranium from Autunite and Pechblende, people would use this stone to tint glass a luminous greenish-yellow and produce chic Baccarat crystal sets.

 

Today, autunite testers abound on YouTube. But it is almost impossible to differentiate between them professionals and amateurs.

 

The medium of the video allows to show this mineral during chemical experiments by the one who search. These observations made available on YouTube sometimes give it sensitive visual properties close to concrete or optical art. By inadvertence, by interest, those who search in the name of curiosity, of science, of an artistic practice make the portrait of this radioactive fruit.

 

Website | Instagram

YOUNGBOYZ, 2022 © Ben Saint-Maxent
YOUNGBOYZ, 2022 © Ben Saint-Maxent

Benjamin Saint-Maxent

YOUNGBOYZ

2022 - 12'00" - Color

This room is where people come to gather.

It’s also where people have heard about the news and share their vision of the world.

It’s a space full of flowers and the vestiges of parties, in which we tried to revive those who are no longer alive. It’s a place where ghosts hang out with the living, and we don’t really know who’s who.

 

Website | Instagram

La femme du bout de l’eau, 2022© Elsa Parisot
La femme du bout de l’eau, 2022© Elsa Parisot

Elsa Parisot

La femme du bout de l'eau

2022 - 5'23" - Color

It’s 1901 – the press report a startling find in as yet uncharted seas. They tell of a team of explorers who, after weeks of seemingly aimless wandering, arrive in a mysterious country and make an extraordinary discovery: a fantasy being: half nymph, half witch. The discovery of this strange creature becomes a legend: “The Woman from the End of the Seas”. Or is she only a myth, an illusion, the hoax of the century! Who knows…
The story plunges us into a fairground universe close to the pre-cinema area. A short format, on the border between the music video and the trailer.

 

Instagram

Sous les Tropismes, 2017-2022 © Romain Silvi, Carlo Productions : Lauren Lenoir – Romain Silvi
Sous les Tropismes, 2017-2022 © Romain Silvi, Carlo Productions : Lauren Lenoir – Romain Silvi

Romain Silvi

Sous les Tropismes

2017/2022 - 23’32’’ - Color

Henri Zürn is a musician. Romain Silvi is a filmmaker. One asks the other to work together on a piece of video and music art. Away from each other, a restless mind and a fragile health, they are going to pursue the truth that is burried somewhere inside the tropisms.

 

Instagram

ShaneSHadow, 2022 © Anne Swaenepoël
ShaneSHadow, 2022 © Anne Swaenepoël

Anne Swaenepoël

ShaneSHadow

2022 - 15'30" - Color

« ShaneShadow » deals with many subjects but particularly with social phobia and anxiety disorder through its character Shane, a gamer who streams her video games online.

After the theft of her bike, she will do everything to find it, without ever leaving her screen. Through collages, editing of images captured on the Internet, and the use of cracked surveillance cameras, the video will tell us about the uneasiness and the suffering that Shane will undergo, victim of her community and trapped in her head.

 

(An other installation visible at the Centre d’Art de Nice (until December 30th) which accompanies this video allows us to enter Shane’s universe and her room, the place where she spended all her time in order to try to understand what she might be feeling.)

La symphonie des vagabonds, 2018 © Yoann Ximenes, courtesy Festival DNA 2021
La symphonie des vagabonds, 2018 © Yoann Ximenes, courtesy Festival DNA 2021

Yoann Ximenes

La symphonie des vagabonds

2018 - 23'00" - Color

Symphony of the wanderers (La Symphonie des Vagabonds) is a digital artistic project that offers an audiovisual wandering in real time. This digital hybrid installation offers us a multimedia interpretation of the planets of the solar system. Combining experimental science and a dreamlike universe, the artist was inspired by the mathematical-sonic research of Hans Cousto and Plato’s theory of the Harmony of the Spheres to transpose the movement of the planets into sound. These sounds are bewitching and graceful, and seem to be inhabited by different personalities.

 

Here, the sound is the trigger, it precedes the form. The visual representation of sounds involves cymatics: the observation of sound vibrations. The eight moving images are formed instantaneously thanks to eight films of water subjected to the vibrations of the planets of the solar system. The frequencies of each of the planets are musically orchestrated. Thanks to the cymatic devices installed on the floor (combining loudspeaker, lighting, water and projection optics), the aquatic drawings forming on the surface of the colored waters are projected onto the ceiling of the exhibition space. Each of the planets moves in an elusive dance. An optical system allows the aquatic vibrations to be projected onto the ceiling. The object is to offer a poetic experience within the solar system. There is no video capture or projection in the device. Te artwork offers a multimedia symphony that leaves room for contemplative meditation. A laboratory of ancient myths where sound images of water immerse the public in an audiovisual cosmic symphony.

 

Instagram | Facebook