Clarisse Hahn

Clarisse Hahn was born in 1973 and lives and works in Paris. Her work is focused mainly on a documentary line of research which is developed by way of films and video installations. In 2002 Hahn showed the installation Ovidie/Hospital at Jousse Entreprise. This work created a link between the professional body language of porn film actors and the coded attitudes of nurses in a geriatric ward. It was directly connected with two films made by Clarisse Hahn: Hospital, 37 minutes, 1999, a foray into the closed world of the Hospital, and Ovidie, 116 minutes, 2000, which recounted the private daily life of a young woman, a porn actress.

The artist has a very close, hands-on relationship with the people she films, and she works with them for a relatively long period of time. In her third film, Karima, 98 minutes, 2002, we followed a young woman of Algerian origin, Karima, for an entire year during which she took us into her family, among her friends, and into the sado-masochistic sessions where she played the dominant role. The shooting of The Protestants, 85 minutes, 2005, has taken three years. With this new film, Clarisse Hahn carries on her research into communities, codes of conduct, and the social role of the body. The artist takes as the subject of her documentary a middle-class Protestant family - her own - which has gathered on the island of Noirmoutier, off France's Atlantic coast. She explores the relations between the various people and the solutions they find for living together. The artist shows us how a way of life is organized, and then handed down from one generation to the next: through a sense of religious belonging and membership, and through different ways of getting together such as “rallyes,” Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, and even a method of natural gymnastics. The characters talk about the values they adhere to and based on which they organize their lives. Little by little, doubts show through, as do contradictions, giving a glimpse into the complexity of the relations each person has with his or her familial, religious and social environment. The tone of intimacy which often marks family-oriented films is upset here by the fact that the people filmed keep a certain distance from the camera, and are even reluctant to face it. It is this resistance that gives the film its tone, a film where the characters are forever expressing a tension between tenderness and emotional withholding, between a hieratic stance and relaxation. One of the challenges of the film was to find a form of writing stemming from an understanding of what the aesthetic concerns of the people filmed are. The camera frames the places where they live, the interiors, pictures and furniture, giving the sensation of a closed, silent world. In dialogue with the portrait gallery represented by the film the exhibition also includes a series of photographs which questions and updates the conventions of the 19th century bourgeois portrait. The body is called into question; at once revealed and hidden. It is the place of relationship with the other, but it is also the borderline which creates an obstacle. It is a place of individuality, but also a place of uniformity.

What do the people photographed give away about themselves? How do they present their bodies, and to what point to they manage to control their appearance?

The film the Protestants will be screened at the Georges Pompidou Centre on Monday 14 November at 6.30 pm, in Cinema 2 and on thursday 27 octobre, 20h30, at La Fémis, in the Jean Renoir space, pointligneplan. 6 rue Francoeur Paris 18°.

The Protestants has been acquired by the Georges Pompidou Centre iit was supported by the CNAP and Le Fresnoy, national studio of contemporary arts. 24 et 34 rue louise weiss - 75013 paris téléphone 01 53 82 10 18 - fax 01 53 82 13 63 - art@jousse-entreprise.com www.jousse-entreprise.com

The exhibition presents a documentary film of 85 minutes as well as a series of independent photographs. Half of the gallery is transformed into a projection room where the film will be exhibited at regular hours. Screenings: 11.30 am / 1 pm / 2.30 pm / 4 pm / 5.30 pm. Clarisse Hahn The protestants.

Clarisse Hahn