Carte blanche, pmu | le bal

Through self-portraits and auto-fiction, Kourtney Roy becomes the sole character of an interior theatre and all its enchantments. Her body, artificially placed in a natural decor, lends itself to a surfeit of enigmas, to a thousand and one travestied and falsified lives. "I is another," to quote Arthur Rimbaud all the others. Laura Palmer multiplied to infinity.

For this immersion into the universe of the PMU, Kourtney Roy imbibed the words of Charles Bukowski and his obsession with the racetracks. Turning away from the spectacle on which all eyes are fixed, she infiltrates the coulisses. Their banal decor proves a more likely stage for the improbable. Her body embeds itself thus in a world where everything can be something else and where anyone can be someone else. This is a world in which objects — greenery, balustrades, binoculars... — have seized power. They dominate the scene, shifting from menace to invasion, from over brilliance to over muteness.

In her photographs, Kourtney Roy seems to be present in the world but absent from herself. The why of these incongruous postures, of these empty gazes, is elsewhere, off-stage, and captures us with a silent and hidden violence. For this body-object most often seems to be turned off, unplugged, eaten away, swallowed up. Impeccably sculpted, it nevertheless lends itself to camouflage, subtraction, dissolution, scrupulously orchestrating its own disappearance.

-text by Diane Dufour, Director of LE BAL