Marine Hugonnier

Since 2001, Hugonnier’s work has been exploring the politics of landscape, looking at it as a remnant of historical circumstances or of geographical and political division. Predominantly working with film and photography, her practice is infused with long-standing interest in the anthropology of images investigating the historical and social implications of places which have strongly determined their culture and imagery. Her 2003 film Ariana charts the journey of a western film crew to the Pandjsher Valley in the North East of Afghanistan to investigate how this unique landscape has determined its history. The film is the story of a failed project that prompts a process of reflection about the ‘panorama’ as a form of strategic overview. The Last Tour (2004) takes as a point of departure the laws that increasingly regulate our access to and perception of Nature in tourists’ visits to national parks. The viewer embarks on a last tour on a hot-air balloon flight over the iconic Matterhorn in the Swiss Alps, suggesting the possibility of a blank space re-appearing on the map, a reference to the world before the Era of Discovery. Travelling Amazonia (2006) was shot on the Transamazonia road, a 2500-miles long highway cutting through Brazil’s vast Amazonian region. The film centres on the artist’s attempt to construct an ideal straight line re-enacting that of the Transamazonia, a road which was carried out in the 1970s during Brazil’s military dictatorship as a route trying to connect the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean. Through the making of a “travelling shoot” that represents the illusion behind the idealism of the Transamazonia – now a line broken in holes failing to be mapped out -, the film addresses the processes, rather than the pioneering ideas, that prevailed after the heyday of Brazil’s aspiration to become “the country of the future”.

Hugonnier (b. 1969, Paris, FR) lives and works in London. Forthcoming solo projects include a show of new works on paper at Max Wigram Gallery and a show at Fortes Vilaca in Sao Paulo (Brazil). Group shows include Sabine Breitweiser’s ’Modernologies’ exhibition touring to the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art (Poland) and ’The Science of Imagination’ at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest (Hungary). Last year she had solo shows at Malmö Konsthall (Sweden), Villa Romana (Florence, Italy), FRAC Champagne-Ardenne (France) and a large restrospective of her work at Kunstverein Braunschweig (Germany) for which a monograph on the artist was published by JRP Ringier. Group shows in 2009 included ’Time as Matter’, MACBA (Barcelona, Spain); ’Modernologies’ MACBA (Barcelona, Spain); ’Then the Work Takes Place’, Kunsthaus Graz (Austria); ’Summertime; or close-ups of places we’ve (never) been’, SFAI (San Francisco, USA). In 2008, Hugonnier’s latest film The Secretary of the Invisible, premiered at MAMCO, Geneva (Switzerland). Solo exhibitions in 2007 included S.M.A.K. (Gent); Philadelphia Museum of Art (USA); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin) and Kunsthalle Bern (CH). In 2007 her work was also shown at the 52nd International Exhibition of Contemporary Art of La Biennale di Venezia and in Pensée Sauvage at Franfurter Kunstverein & Ursula Blicke Foundation (Germany). Group shows in 2006 included The British Art Show 6 and the 2006 Busan Biennale (Korea).

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