Innovative Curatorial Projects – Paris / SingaporeMireille Astore
*1961, Beirut, Lebanon. Lives and works in Sydney, Australia.
Mireille Astore is an artist, a writer and adjunct lecturer at the Sydney College of the Arts, the Visual Arts Faculty of the University of Sydney. She has a PhD in Contemporary Arts and her video artworks have been highly acclaimed and have been shown in such venues as the Tate Modern, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 8th Sharjah Biennial and 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, Home Works IV – Beirut, and Santa Margherita Auditorium, Venice. In 2003 she won the (Australian) National Photographic Purchase Award and she is featured in the Thames and Hudson Publication New Vision: Arab Contemporary Art in the 21st Century.
Of Mireille Astore’s Tampa artwork, it was said: “Just as Benjamin noted the contextual aesthetic consequences of the circulation of photographic images through newspapers and magazines, Astore’s combination of photography with sculpture and performance, circulated via her website, rewrites both photography and the spatial and interpretive dynamics of this installation work.” Peter Hutchings, Eyeline issue 54, Winter 2004.
3494 Houses + 1 Fence [with Fabien Astore] / Lebanon-Australia / 2006 / 6' / 16:9
The street scape of Broken Hill, "the accessible outback" country town of Australia, is seen from the viewing platform of a Lebanese reality. Houses, neat, some pretty, some with children playing in front collide with sounds remembered from so long ago, maybe from one of Beirut's many wars, maybe even from future wars. There, exponential repetition sets apathy on a collision course with fear where mangled silences interrupt - but only to disrupt the remnants of safe living and to send eidetic shock waves through rose-colored lenses. The question of responsibility then emerges to demand, if not an answer, then a pause for grief, for consideration due to the boundaries of the senses and the centrality of the body's - any-body's - pain and sorrow.