Marie Quéau

Le Royaume 

Social organization breeds its dissidents, its rejects and marginals. To approach these social outcasts there are mostly documents or images emanating from the circle of power. Le Royaume is the portrait of an imaginary community created between 2017 and 2019, tinted with magic and ritual. My approach in this work resembles that of an archeologist : reviving dead worlds, renewing the dialogue with beings from another time, to tell the story of our present as well as possible. These bodies are penetrated by a force which destabilizes them and creates a vast field of tensions. Their race towards an unknown place also reconnects with the notion of a rite of passage, of time suspended, where the ordinary reorganizes itself and resets itself to link an individual to a group. The blue, gold or black colored mud make the faces and bodies anonymous and offers itself as a second skin, a protection from the outside as well. It allows the body to liberate itself, to be violent and tender. This community of characters speaks to us of a dark and diluvian time. These gestures and bodies, whose significance remains mysterious, narrates a life in the fringes of a Realm without images. Their existence is ambiguous but tenacious and described my ambivalent and agonizing LoveHate relationship to our world.

Born in 1985 in Choisy-le-Roi (France), Marie Quéau has lived and worked in Paris since her last residency at the Cité internationale des arts in 2017. Graduate of the ENSP Arles (2009), her work has been exhibited at the PhotoLevallois Festival, the Salon de Montrouge, the International Festival of Fashion and Photography in Hyères, Filature Mulhouse, Gallery Michel Chomette, as well as in various museums and institutions. In 2012, she received the Nofound Photo Fair/de Groot Foundation Prize for her series Gojira. Started in 2013, her Odds and Ends project has already been supported by the CNES Space Observatory, the DRAC Grand Est and the Centre Européen d’Actions Artistiques Contemporaines (international project grants). In 2016, the artist was selected for a post-production residency at the CPIF (Centre Photographique d’Ile-de-France) where she exhibited Odds and Ends series within the frame of Les Précipités #3. Her photographs were also displayed at Présent & Projet exhibition, held at the Cité internationale des Arts in 2017. Marie Quéau was also laureate of the 2017 CNAP creation grants (contemporary documentary photography). In 2018, Odds end Ends won the Carré sur Seine Prize and was named among the finalists for the HSBC Photography Prize. In september 2018, her series Handbook was published by September Books. In the meantime, Marie Quéau has participated in various collective exhibitions in Ofr. bookstore, Galerie Triple V and les Frigos in Paris. She has also taken part in collective publications such as Passion #3 « La belle vie sous un autre angle« , Alterzeitgeist by Marielle Chabal and Talweg 02 (Pétrole éditions). She was recently laureate of the « Résidence sur Mesure«  grant, supported by the French Institute, for her project « 232,8°C«  that will be led in Rio (Brazil) in 2019.