Throughout the diverse projects that punctuate my work, there is a common thread: the exploration of relationships and physicality.
This is expressed through photography and writing, but also through sound installations, performances, and videos, which have appeared more regularly in my work in recent years.
These two concerns—relationships and physicality—underpin our human condition, which I never tire of exploring. In my work, I approach these aspects through research into landscape and natural forces, questions surrounding the body and its representations, and explorations of beauty, desire, love, fear, intimacy, power dynamics, and dematerialization.
Resolutely physical, whether through the chosen formats, their installation in space, the particularly tactile and attractive materiality of the pigment prints, or the subject itself—the body—my work is nevertheless, paradoxically, about fixity and maintaining a distance.
The frozen movement, mimed, is never spontaneous or liberated; it is a fixity that draws a line between photography and life. A photography in which, unfortunately, nothing dies, but everything remains suspended.
The mixture in my images of this strange “living” presence—the body, nature—and its possible but often compromised beauty and sovereignty has long engendered a body of work in which blackness, blur, dust, and damage prowl: traces of a potential danger of annihilation through absorption, dissolution, or destruction.
However, humor and irony are not absent, appearing in the turn of a sentence or in the self-portraits: games of hide-and-seek around an identity that the viewer would like to capture.
Figures is a series of self-portraits that seeks to say more about the spectator than about the person represented. The figure, apparently offered to the viewer, turns her back on the spectator—a position traditionally reserved for the traitor in theatrical plays.
The series questions what we want to see, our frustrations, the representation of women, their supposed accessibility as desirable bodies, and the status of the model, whom we can inspect in great detail without being looked back at and therefore without having to consider her otherness.
The series is composed of similar images of figures seen from behind, customizable through the choice of clothing. The printed format approaches a 1:1 scale, bringing the viewer face-to-face with a kind of living sculpture: colorful yet frozen.
Through its two-dimensional nature, the image intrinsically refuses any unveiling or any unshared otherness. The bare skin is merely a device to attract the eye—a trap, in short, leading us to contemplate our own relationships with one another.
About Aurore Dal Mas
Aurore Dal Mas earned a Master’s degree in Photography from La Cambre (Brussels, 2005).
She has exhibited her work at the Musée de la Photographie in Charleroi (2009, 2012, 2021), the Water Tower Art Fest in Sofia (Bulgaria, 2013), the Circulation(s) festival in Paris and 44 Gallery in Bruges (Belgium, 2014), L’Orangerie in Bastogne (Belgium, 2016), the Bruggefoto festival in Bruges (Belgium, 2017), Peinture Fraîche (Belgium, 2018), La Nuu Festival (Barcelona, 2019), and the Track & Trace festival (Kortrijk, Belgium, 2021), as well as the Cortona On The Move festival in Italy (2021) and the Ragusa Foto Festival in Sicily (2021).
Her performance piece As Long As was presented at Recyclart and LaVallée (Brussels, 2014 and 2016), and her sound installation Fire was exhibited at the Italian Cultural Institute (Brussels, 2018).
She self-published her first publication, Sans issue, in 2016, followed by U-turn in 2021. She published her first photobook, Dead End Dust, with Yellow Now (Belgium, 2018). Her second, Don’t Love Me, I’m Your Toy, was published by DIRTYillness (UK, 2019).
Her short film I Am Not Seen was selected and screened at various festivals in Europe and the U.S. [Official Website]
