Alumna and Faculty Member Christine Rebet '11 in Exhibition at French Institute Alliance Française

Visual Arts alumna and Adjunct Assistant Professor, Christine Rebet '11, was recently in exhibition at the French Institute Alliance Française with her video art piece, In the Soldiers Head (2015). The exhibition ran from January 16 through February 23, 2019.

In the Soldier’s Head was a part of Taming Nature: Animated Perspectives, a special introduction to FIAF’s Animation First Festival. Her "hand-drawn animations of haunting traumatic memories resurfacing” explore “the violence of the relationship between interiority and reality,” according to FIAF.

The process for the piece developed when she returned to France from New York in 2012 and realized how little France had come to terms with its collective traumatic history, especially when it comes to its colonial past. Describing In the Soldier’s Head in Artforum, Rebet says, “it was clear to me that I wanted to talk about mental disruption as a figure for the collective experience of colonization, and that I wanted to carry this out through the disruption of the animation itself. In short, my aim was to make a non-animation, something that interrupted the continuous cycle of images through a secondary process. The final moments of the animation return to the beginning of civilization, or the beginning of animation, in the cave, but the image is fleeting, ungraspable. After all, you can’t really get a hold of a mind in crisis.”

According to FIAF, Rebet “has previously exhibited and held performances in various international venues including: LACE (Los Angeles), Human Resources (Los Angeles), Kunsthal KAdE (Amersfoort, Netherlands), Grieder Contemporary (Zurich), AlbumArte (Rome), Unge Kunstneres Samfund, (Oslo), Sculpture Center (New York); the Institute of Contemporary Art (Singapore); the Cartier Foundation (Paris); the Fisher Landau Center for Art (New York); and Le Magasin (Grenoble, France). Her most recent solo exhibition, Thunderbird, was held at Bureau (New York). Her films have been screened at various events and festivals including Hong Kong Film Festival, Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, Ohio), Husets Biograf (Copenhagen), Winkleman Gallery (New York), the Berlinale Short Film Festival (Berlin), and the Moderna Museet (Stockholm). Her recent film, In the Soldier’s Head (2015), is currently touring film festivals worldwide. Rebet’s work appears in the public collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris) and the Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne (Vitry-sur-Seine, France).”