Installations

Of course, spectators were invited to dance, to get closer, to rediscover themselves…. ORLAN lines the exhibition room from floor to ceiling with cardboard signs bearing the project slogans “JE SUIS SLOWSEXUEL.LE”, “NOUS SOMMES SLOWSEXUEL.LE.S”, “JE SUIS ARTSEXUEL.LE”, “NOUS SOMMES ARTSEXUEL.LE.S”. These signs were used by ORLAN during her first demonstration “Je Suis Slowsexuel.le”, which appears at the end of her eponymous title “Je Suis Slowsexuel.le”. They have become a ubiquitous iconographic feature of the project. Facet balls and light projections create a sensual, intimate space. ORLAN created two augmented reality avatars in her image, in reference to the album cover. One in a blue wig, the other in a two-tone wig, both in costume with her manifesto dress. Her costume was designed by Beñat Moreno, and featured a lycra dress and chiffon cape. He created a textile print using the slogans on the signs, all in black and white. With this costume, ORLAN becomes a manifesto, visually embodying her concept. This installation is used by ORLAN for performances, demonstrations and a showcase at the closing.

She realized that many of her students had never danced the slow dance, and she decided that things couldn’t go on like this—she had to do something for the young people! Through this project, she hopes to introduce and revive this dance as a form of therapy during this still-difficult period of rebuilding.

ORLAN wrote the lyrics for each slow song, which she then shared with musicians so they could compose the melodies and sing her lyrics.  She then inserted her voice into the music, in collaboration with the guest.

This album brings together twenty extraordinary slow songs created by ORLAN in perfect harmony with some fantastic artists: Sir Alice, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Terrenoire, Les Tetines Noires, Les Chicks On Speed, Mimosa, Yael Naim, Tentative, Régis Campo, Myope, Blue Carmen, Les Sans Pattes, La Femme, Romain Brau, Charlie Morrow, Demi Mondaine, Charlemagne Palestine, Kat May, and Iury Lech.

The vinyl is on sale at FNAC and on all platforms. Several clips have been produced to visually illustrate ORLAN’s message: she made “Je suis slowsexuel.le” with Sir Alice and “Les corps de métiers m’excitent” with Tentative. A book will be published with texts written by the artist. ORLAN  has performed on several occasions with musicians including Demi Mondaine on Culture Box.

After a long discussion with him, she wanted to work with her own stem cells, and she proposed a project along these lines to the Institut Pasteur, which was refused by the ethics committee because it is forbidden in France to work with these cells. The body and its use are political and social. Our bodies don’t belong to us.

Finally, the Institut Pasteur, through Fabrice Hyber, invited him to work artistically in their new OMICS building, in the lobby of the Simone Veil and Alexandre Yersin buildings.

ORLAN has created a complete environment from colorful images of her cells and viruses, as in Le bœuf sur la langue, but in a different version. The words included in these colorful harlequinoid images were, for example, “rabies”, “pasteurella pestis”, “vaccine”, or “researcher”, a term that ORLAN greatly appreciates as it underlines the feminization of professional names, whereas Marie Curie, as a woman, suffered greatly from being a researcher among researchers.

The images were installed in light boxes and on a floor covering, on and under bleachers and on high round tables covered with this print. The final touch is a very large tondo, installed at the top of the white wall opposite the bleachers.

ORLAN transferred them to fairground garland pennants, creating a huge garland with a bowler hat at one end. She then folded the garland, rolling it as tightly as possible to fit as many portraits as possible into the hat. When it was extremely full, she stopped the work. This installation is currently on display in the reception hall of his STUDIO, creating a kind of festive atmosphere as soon as you enter, perpetuating the concept of “permanent celebration” spoken of by Robert Fillliou.

The words were taken from his installation Un Boeuf sur la langue. ADVENTURE, WITH, COURAGE, WANDERING, GENDER, HYBRIDIZATION, PANIC, SOLITUDE, SURFEMME, TRANSGRESSION. There were several points in the city near the Seine where spectators could see the installation and discuss what these words evoked in them. In a second phase, ORLAN organized with France Culture at the Palais de Tokyo, François Angelier’s program Mauvais genres, where guests were invited by the artist to speak in a scholarly way about the words projected in the city. Guests included Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Cynthia Fleury, Maria Bonnafous-Boucher, Jean de Loisy, Bernard Blistène, Ruwen Ogien, Jean-Pierre Dionnet, Jean Baptiste Thoret and Pacôme Thiellement.

WE PROJECT OUR EXPERIENCES AND MEMORIES INTO THESE WORDS.

IN THESE WORDS, THE EMOTIONS OF OUR HISTORY AND OUR KNOWLEDGE MINGLE.

SOME WORDS HAVE HAD THEIR DAY, BECOME OBSOLETE, OLD-FASHIONED OR OVERUSED, WHILE OTHERS HAVE RE-EMERGED…

SAYING IS ALREADY IN ACTION, ACTION IS CREATIVE AND PART OF THE MENTAL LANDSCAPE IN WHICH WE THINK AND WHICH SPEAKS THROUGH US.”

ORLAN

These dresses were worn by black models and were black on the back, but very colorful on the front. The furniture included a table with a revolving top and a very large semi-circular bench made up of interlocking stools on castors, on which the public sat during the many discussions organized during the exhibition about the words featured in the space. Participants could either stay in the conversation collectively, or roll up their seats and detach themselves from the group, and the conversation became individual again.

The concept of the exhibition was to blend design, fashion, art, sculpture, texts and medical imagery in a single venue, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes.

When we entered the installation, everything was black and we couldn’t understand what the mannequins were holding. The atmosphere was heavy, inquisitive, almost morbid. Moving into the oratory chapel, little by little it was possible to read texts like “dire”, “athée”, “sur-femme”, “symbiotique”… And, at the same time, see the front of the garments made from this very colorful silk velvet, like a harlequinade.

The recurring motif of Harlequin’s cloak in the video, projected onto the back of the barn and onto the limousine windows (transformed into stained glass for the occasion), acts as a metaphor. It replaces a smooth, orderly vision of the world with a patchwork of combinations and futures. To the sound of the Paso Doble and in a popular ballroom atmosphere, ORLAN makes her skin cells, filmed in macro, dance with those of other humans and animal species. Once again, she uses her body to push back taboos and defend a reality in the making, showing what we’re all made of, whatever our skin color.

At the foot of the cross, there are a hundred footballs in which ORLAN has printed excerpts from the most erotic of hymns.

One of the balloons is sacralized on a square white wooden base and preserved by a plexiglass bell.

ORLAN questions the social phenomenon of soccer, which is taking over our lives. 

She draws a parallel between religion and soccer, which is why she mixes the sounds of mass and matches, because in both cases there is ritual and worship.

In 2009, ORLAN created the installation Suture-Hybridation-Recyclage, in which she hybridized her wardrobe following the same protocol with David Delfin, Maroussia Rebecq and Agatha Ruiz de la Prada, asking them to find a way of assembling two of her different garments to bring together times, materials, designers and moments in her history. Maroussia Rebecq has cut two garments and attached a small fluorescent yellow lace to bring them together, while David Delfin has attached ribbons full of staples, enabling them to be detached and reattached to another garment, creating a hybridization, or rather a temporary assembly and multiple shifting hybridizations.

Agatha Ruiz de la Prada proposed a more radical solution. She carefully selected beautiful dresses from her museum, cut them in half and then split ORLAN’s garments in half from the waist down and assembled them.

So each dress was recomposed with half an Agatha Ruiz de la Prada dress, and half dresses from ORLAN’s wardrobe, whose designer I don’t necessarily know. ORLAN has kept her entire wardrobe since adolescence.

This performance in the form of a medical intervention was realized in 2007, when ORLAN was invited for a three-month residency at the University of Perth in Australia, where they created the SymbioticA laboratory through Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr in the Department of Human Anatomy and Biology, in collaboration with BioArt technician Jens Hauser.

The staging was minimal: around the hospital bed on which ORLAN lay, dressed in harlequin cloth, were two sheets of the same fabric, one velvet and the other satin.

A diamond-shaped incision was made in the groin crease by burn surgeon Fiona Wood.

Following this medical intervention, the installation “Le manteau d’Arlequin” was created.

It’s a very large, bright room, with convex walls in places. When you entered the room, you could listen to the sound of the video, which was displayed on a small screen like a cartel outside the room.

For this installation, ORLAN has completely reworked the image of her surgeon, Dr. Marjorie Kramer, who herself  has to rework her image.

The artist paints the walls and ceiling of the stairwell at the Espace Lyonnais d’Art Contemporain in the same fluorescent green as the operating theater in New York for the 7th Omniprésence operation. In the ceiling, there was a huge three-armed operating theatre with three spotlights, and four screens showing video footage of the operations integrated into the ceiling. The title is inscribed on the wall, on the floor, on a turntable… depending on the version.

Later, the piece was purchased by Thierry Raspail for the collection of the city’s Museum of Modern Art, of which he was then director.

ORLAN has captured the “in-between”, i.e. the exact image of the environment conceived from her face hybridized with a portrait of one of her art-historical reference figures, without retouching.

At the top, on the other side of the diptych, ORLAN used magnets to place the image of the day, a self-portrait made by the MACHINE-CORPS, of a face first with bandages, then with colors: from blue to yellow to red, the whole quite swollen. A metal plate was installed between these two images, engraved with the words: entre-deux and the day’s date.

By the last day, the installation was complete and so was the exhibition.

With very limited resources, ORLAN reworked the video in post-production, using special effects that were highly avant-garde for the time. For the occasion, she created a mask printed with a photo of her vulva. She would later use this accessory on numerous occasions, notably in her “Kiss on pussy” performance. She is dressed in a photographic canvas dress depicting her naked body, which she had created for her performance “S’habiller de sa propre nudité”. Staging a big fiat is a humorous video. In this work, ORLAN incorporates a text she wrote on the death of her father, who used to place fireflies on his hat at night. The text reads, “You put all the fireflies on earth around your hat and went deep into the night – now I know where the stars come from.” The video talks about his two fathers: one for life, François, one for his art, Marcel and his star-shaped tonsure.

ORLAN presented this video in a multi-screen installation in a marquee set up as part of the Festival d’Art Électronique in Toulouse in 1986.

ORLAN invited visual poets, musicians, video artists, literary figures, philosophers and visual artists to create a work (or several works) using the enormous pixels and 8 gradations of gray that made up the Minitel. 

These were the best international artists, carefully selected from those working in situ and/or with conceptual issues. Artists capable of fighting with or against constraints, able to divert and circumvent difficulties, and to ask themselves the problems of the medium they invest in.  

Two keys are available to help the public better understand the works and artists. Consultants wishing to do so will be able to display two additional pages on their screen, one written by the artist himself, setting out his position and angle of attack, and explaining why he has chosen to respond to the Minitel in this way. Another page given over to a critic chosen by the artist (and not the other way around) will present the artist to the public in clear, non-jargonized terms. Only artists can transgress, adapt, play with and exploit the full potential of this new tool.

The resulting works are often counterpoints (Bernar Venet, Ange Leccia, Vera Molnar, Aldo Spinelli) to the usual videotex, or ironically imitate the services by mischievously slipping into them (Jean-François Bory, Alain Snyers, Jean-Claude Lefèvre). 

Every two months, the magazine featured additional works and columns by artists (Ben, Charles Dreyfus, Scarpetta, Sarenco), and took into account questions from the general public, giving answers and the right of reply. ORLAN has organized nights in the company of Buren, Didier Bay, Léa Lublin, Morellet…  

For our surprise parties, isn’t it delicious to make love, guilt-free, with Sainte-ORLAN flashing her breast and eyes, a welcome replacement for the saints of Lisieux or elsewhere with their little colored lights, this cold, modern Minitel that can become, depending on the artist, baroque, ironic or kitsch.

Poetry and literature were the Minitel’s tried-and-tested and favorite partners, and a new way of writing/reading was born, a new visual poetry (Frédéric Develay, Sarenco, Jil Wolman). 

When it came to music, the Minitel had no sound! Musicians such as Franck Royon Le Mée proposed graphic scores. Musicians such as Gean-Yves Bosseur, Alain Savouret, Martin Davori Jagodic, Pierre Mariétan, Michel Redolfi and Max Neuhaus played on plastic scores or unplayable scores. 

On several occasions, ORLAN has shown large-scale installations consisting of stacks of Minitels with the images produced. 

This installation was presented by Jean Paul Lyota in the exhibition Les Immatériaux at the Centre Pompidou, 1985.

On either side, the white faux-tiled elements depicted a garter belt, a long skirt with lace, a bra with halved plastic hard-boiled eggs glued to each breast, and a sex adorned with plastic parsley.

This character could be dressed and undressed. It was a lot of fun.

ORLAN was a pioneer; there were no other artists doing this with photography. She brought photography out of its flatness, out of its confinement in the frame and on the wall. She wanted to give representations of the body a new presentation in space, to create a sfumato between figuration and refiguration.

Both an installation and a performance space, the Chapelle functioned as a work of art in the artist’s absence, and as a set designed for the performance. The entrance was decorated with artistically draped hangings, topped by a black-and-white photo of Sein unique, Monstration phallique. Once inside, visitors were confronted with a personal theater made up of real, artificial and virtual 3D elements: a resin statue of Saint Orlan, a single bare breast and a finger raised to the sky, quantities of plastic flowers mixed with lilies and arums, a hologram representing an angel, live doves. Real and fake marble plaques and photographs of ORLAN as a madonna were placed on the floor in front of the statue, and a series of columns from the Opéra de Lyon formed a semicircle around it. Behind the statue, she had placed a large halo of mirrors, a video monitor showing the space and part of her sculpted face, accentuating the perspective effect created by the combination of architectural elements. The title refers to her own ironic canonization, her appropriation of the role of the Saint and her own designation of a place for this cult.

The constructed and deconstructed images, mixing color and black-and-white photography, produced successive series, a set of very deregulated and visually interesting photographs exhibited in her retrospective at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie by Jérôme Neutres in 2017, “ORLAN en Capitales” and in many other exhibitions, including at the Musée des Abattoirs in Toulouse, curated by Annabelle Ténèze, and recently at 104 in the interactive exhibition “Fête foraine”, curated by José Manuel Álvarez and Fabrice Bousteau.