Mixed Marriages, Free Marriages and Barbarian Weddings

128 pages
19 x 25 cm
languages : French/English
release : 2010
ISBN 978-2-916275-66-6

Mixed Marriages, Free Marriages and Barbarian Weddings is a monograph of ORLAN’s most recent work, and completely unpublished. Often acts of rebellion and resistance against contemporary pressures, politics, religious or social, acting on the individual, the creations of ORLAN deflect the latest technological innovations to create a highly interrogative work.

The works show the different materials and creative techniques used by the artist. Orlan Remix: Romain Gary, Costa-Gavras, Deleuze and Guattari, is a video work on a clip of the film Clair de Femme by Costa-Gavras, projected onto a huge inflatable limousine, a symbol of luxury and marriage.

The video captures absurd dialogues delivered by Yves Montand and Roberto Benigni and substitutes a smooth and orderly vision of the world with a patchwork of combinations and futures.

ORLAN equally makes contemporary sculpture by using a number of technological and electronic innovations. Her spectacular and interactive piece, Sculpting Brushes, light prototype No.1, is a post-human being of the feminine sex, both black and white at the same time, a techno-summoning of our ancestor Lucy. Its skin contains sensors that transform the light from the sculpture according to changes in its environment.

More than a work on symbols and social representations, ORLAN’s work is part of an ethical approach. If the limousine shows prosperity and wealth, its shape of a balloon makes it fleeting and derisive. Similarly, the use of high-tech materials in Sculpting Brushes, especially coltan which is fiercely exploited – for mobile phones and other portable computers – is today a source of serious geopolitical conflict, and denounces the ravages of the capitalist system.

The book is complemented by an essay by Raoul Vaneigem around the notion of hybridization and by a debate around these new works between the artist and the philosopher Raphael Enthoven.