LES HALLES
FROM APRIL 7 TO NOVEMBER 30 2009
The Finnish visual artist Anu Pennanen explores the contemporary uses of generic architecture in major European conurbations. In the context of her residence at CENTQUATRE, she is completing the final part of a cinematographic trilogy on shopping centres, taking Les Halles in Paris as her subject just prior to its facelift in 2010.
Here, at the foremost intersection of traffic, commerce and leisure in Europe, all the outlying suburbs meet, well away from Parisian splendour. Her project hinges round an experimental maquette, a short film and a visual and sound installation that integrates the experience of projection into the whole of the work. The period in residence will be dedicated to writing the script and preparing the film. It will generate writing workshops with the public and those taking part in the film: users of Les Halles, people who used to work there, or simply people who frequently visit the centre, the nucleus consisting of young people from Aubervilliers, a commune on the outskirts of Paris, near to CENTQUATRE.
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Product by Avenue B (France) and Avanton Production (Finland).
Sponsored by AVEK and FRAME Finnish Fund for Art Exchange.
The artist is living at the Cité internationale des Arts at the invitation of Culturesfrance.
BIOGRAPHY
Anu Pennanen was born in 1975 at Kirkkonummi (Finland). She currently
lives and works in Paris after graduating from the Helsinki Academy of Arts in 2003.
As a multimedia artist, she works in close collaboration with the people featured on her videos and concentrates her thinking on the influence of the organization of space, urban architecture and modernization on human behaviour. The works of Anu Pennanen are alternative monuments to the disappearance or radical transformation of places. They set out to depict the psychological characteristics of the places she points her camera at, with the cooperation of the residents of the districts she works in. She is constantly looking for scenarios capable of expressing different socio-political aspects peculiar to a place. The specific nature of each site is immediately perceived by the viewer, for each work as if by magic captures its distinctive visual markers. Since 2004 she has participated in numerous biennals and group exhibitions throughout the world, and her works A Monument for the invisible and Project Space have been presented individually in Berlin, Brussels and Haarlem in the Netherlands. Four of her films were shown recently at the Finnish Institute in Paris.
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