Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of Amie Barouh. It is the first time the emerging French-Japanese artist exhibits her works in the Great Britain.
Installations of several new short video works and paintings on paper comprise the show of the recent Beaux-Arts de Paris graduate.
Barouh creates video works between documentary and fiction, giving voice to those who live on margins of society.
Then birth of a baby in a Roma community Barouh has befriended over a decade, has inspired the artist profoundly. The new born girl is named Béthanie, a place where a miracle – a core Christian tenet of Jesus’s eventual return – is to take place. It symbolise a hope though it may require period of waiting.
The exhibition is a sort of record the young artist’s journey who has been searching to deepen the understanding of the culture which is intrinsically a totally removed one from her own; she has been asking questions about the belief, knowledge, cosmologie of Roma, an ostracised group of people within the Western European vision the world. A series of new films present a new approach to the research; the artist inviting her Roma friends to play active roles such as actors, cameraman, production managers, leaving them to come up with their own ideas of what they wish to do. The final editions are mixture of the resulting footages with documentary of daily life of these same protagonists.
Barouh found that her friends, empowered to create and present new persona, were often proud to enact their ideal selves, which may be imagined personalities but in their minds these characters are the true selves of who they are. In a way, broken free even momentarily from the strict oppression and destress arose from their attachement to Evangelical Christianisme the artist witnessed but finally come to enjoy the benefit of the ‘miracle’ after perpetual period of waiting.
Magic presents for the artist another way to come closer to different cultures by providing means to change a perception of the world through presenting different reality and hope. In one of the short films a teenager shows youngsters a magic trick and a little one tries to uncover the trick and do the same.
A number of small format paintings on paper on the ground floor gallery reflect the artist’s interest in the primitive cultures and mythologies which forms the basic for all her artistic investigation.
In addition to new short videos, ‘The Lost Dog’ is projected in the lower floor gallery which premiered at the first edition of the Festival de Film de la Villa Medici in 2021 and which won the artist the Félicita de Felicita prize by the amis des Beaux Arts de Paris.
