Catherine Beaugrand

Catherine Beaugrand
born in 1953 in Mazingarbe (France), lives in Paris
For almost twenty years, Catherine Beaugrand has been investigating the process we put into play in order to understand the world we live in, in its finest nuances and mutations. She uses installations, films, photographs, and spectacles as the instruments of her research, which is particularly focused on the idea of representation.
January, 2000 provides the occasion to present an ambitious work at the Quartier : the Holbein Project. Evoking the complex work on perspective undertaken during the Renaissance to better simulate the world, the Holbein Project is an architecture in glass set on a metal base. Three video films are projected onto the glass surfaces, and the succession of moving images and their reflections modifies the perception of the space. The settings in the videos are real : industrial spaces, research laboratories, science museums…, other images come from documentary sources — those of NASA, of the Ariane program, and of settlement projects for the Moon and Mars carried out by Japanese construction companies. A glass vessel, an optical instrument of precision on the scale of a theme park, this « House of Mirrors » is bound to the space it inhabits. A group of small animated figurines arranged on a glass shelf at the entrance to the “House of Mirrors“ comes to life as visitors pass by.
Other installations complete this exhibition : Luna Park explores the miniature societies of theme parks, and Pacifique comme un homme courageux, (Peaceful Like a Brave Man), describes the wars fought during the “post-war“ period.