The Galerie Eva Hober presents "Gravé dans la robe", a solo exhibition by Pauline Bastard, which will run from 19 October to 23 November 2018.

The exhibition is centred around the project ‘Agones" (meaning ‘contests’ in Greek), which was created in Athens in 2018. The film and the items that compose this project emerged from a re-interpreting of the Opening Ceremony of the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens. To achieve this, Pauline Bastard brought together a team to help her recreate the ceremony amidst Olympic sports venues that had lain unused for the last 14 years. Caryatids, a centaur, an angel, Athena, Eros…the various costumed participants worked together on the preparations for the show, really getting into the skin of their characters and how they would express themselves.

The project features a number of different backdrops against which this strange community of ghostly figures ponders the narrative/account of the spectacle. In what order did the different characters arrive? Was Eros really blue? Did Apollyon/Apollo have wings? The participants appear to be recreating a memory from aeons past. The ceremony itself drew on representations of figures from antiquity, frescoes and statues. Likewise, the participants try to identify and recreate the key players and issues of this past event.

Pauline Bastard’s projects are about imitation and re-enactment. She takes stories to pieces and puts them back together to better understand them and to bring their more unusual aspects into the light.

In 2013, she bought a house in order to dismantle it and return its constituent parts to the natural world whence they came in "Les États de la Matière" (States of Matter). Then she created "Alex" (2015), a fictitious character who she tried to introduce into society. Since 2017, she has holidayed with an entirely artificial ‘family’ as part of the ‘Construire les liens familiaux’ (Family Bonding) project. With "Agones", historical narratives and mythologies are questioned. In its attempt to recreate the opening ceremony, the little community in the stadium takes on this broad epic story, but with the means of turning its weapons against itself; by entering these empty stadia, the community reclaims a communal space that had previously been abandoned.