‘Memory Beacon’ / Natacha Donzé
24 May – 6 July, 2024
Parliament
36 rue d’Enghien
75010 Paris, France
Parliament is pleased to present “Memory Beacon,” the second solo exhibition by Natacha Donzé at the gallery.
“Memory Beacon” could refer as much to the virtual universe as to a human nostalgic feeling. It is not the ambivalence of those two iconographies that fuels Natacha Donzé’s reflection, but their porousness: how the codes of living beings have become those of machines, coexisting with equal relevance in both realms, as if they were a logical mutation of our realities and an extension of our sensory experiences. Our contemporary iconographies replay the codes of living beings and ancient traditions. The same warning of danger is ultimately issued to our eyes when an animal adorns its body red as when an electrical device uses this code to warn us of a malfunction or risk.
The exhibition took as its starting point the flocks of birds (corvids), shaped by their communications, heralding events to come For birds, signals along the network are passed from eyes or ears to brains pre-wired at birth with the accumulated wisdom of the millenia. For humans, signals are passed from screen to screen, news feed to news feed, along an artificial superstructure designed by humans but increasingly mediated by at-times-unpredictable algorithms. By relying on this phenomenon of “murmuration,” the exhibition explores the emergence of those connections between living organisms and technological devices, with each action impacting the structure and behaviour of the network, in a perpetual cycle of stimuli and information.
This back-and-forth between primordial signals and ultra-contemporary relics stretches time, situating the present within a much vaster geological chronology, and bringing contemporary human closer to their ancestor from the past, questioning the self-proclaimed uniqueness of each generation. “Memory Beacon” could serve as a sigil, drawing us towards the past and acting as a discreet warning about our potential futures. The paintings become interfaces between reality and our mental zone of representation. Each painting imbues the retina with a familiar strangeness, leading to a passage from sign to signal. Through this movement, Natacha Donzé denaturalises our logic of associations and frames of thought, opening a new grid of understanding of the real.
Artist’s solo exhibitions have recently been held at Kunst(Zeug)Haus in Rapperswil-Jona (2022), the Musée des Beaux-Arts in La Chaux-de-Fonds (2021), and Unit110 in New York (2018). Her work has been exhibited in group shows at MCBA in Lausanne (2023), the Kunstmuseum Appenzell as part of the Vordemberge-Gildewart Scholarship (2023), CAPC in Bordeaux (2022), and Hagiwara Projects in Tokyo (2021), among others. In 2023, Natacha Donzé received the Swiss Art Award and the Kiefer Hablitzel Prize for young artists in 2019. She also received the Young Artist Prize from the Musée d’art de La Chaux-de-Fonds in 2018, awarded during the Contemporary Art Biennale.