Camille Bardin — March 2021

 

It was a vital impulse that drove Séverine Assouline to become an artist. In 2012, she laid the foundation stone and modeled her first body: that of a sandstone dinosaur weighing over a hundred kilograms. Through sheer determination, and despite being self-taught, Séverine Assouline acquired both technical and semantic skills. The works that followed this initial success were initially introspective, a way for her to begin a process of deconstruction, to question femininity, its masquerade, and with it, the way she herself inhabits the world.

For this, Séverine Assouline draws on her work as a psychoanalyst, focusing on childhood and the construction of the self. A subject that is as much psychological as social, since it was then a question of detecting the injunctions we are confronted with from childhood onwards, but also, more broadly, the reminiscences that emerge from the confines of our unconscious. (...)

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Séverine Assouline's reuse of certain motifs - as in Anthropocène or Matrix - is recurrent. It allows her to weave links between her works, to multiply their meanings, but also to underline once again the interdependencies that pre-exist and flourish. So what could be more natural than to take an interest in khipus? A mathematical language devised by the Incas and based on the weaving of knots. An expression technique that we still haven't managed to decipher.

 

Séverine Assouline draws a parallel with our contemporary algorithmic languages and proposes a personal interpretation to question the future legibility of our era and the management of Big Data. In this way, she invents her own algorithm and weaves knots, as she would paint on a canvas, to tell the story of historical and seminal events of our time. Once again, it's a question of breaking down borders and disunions and weaving links: links between the past, present and future, links between individuals and their identities, links between the conscious and the unconscious, links between herself and others. It's the poetics of the hyphen.