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RENAUD AUGUSTE-DORMEUIL
A resident at the Villa Medici from 2008 to 2009, he was awarded the Le Meurice Prize for Contemporary Art in 2009-2010. He is represented by the In Situ Gallery (Romainville). His artistic work, which takes the form of photographs, videos, and installations, explores, in particular, "new cartographies" and themes related to security issues. Between what we know and what we think we know, between memory and forgetting, Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil is interested in communication technologies as a critical reflection on their use. Starting from the problem of the destruction and fabrication of images, the artist explores different temporalities, all of which are related to the question of point of view: from where do we see things, and at what moment? For the Biennale, and in the form of a performance, I Will Keep a Light Burning gives form to the lines of tomorrow's sky. Lit throughout the evening, candles gradually appeared like a constellation of the future, in a huge circle materializing the invisible.
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CATHERINE BALET
Born in 1959, Catherine Balet lives between Paris and the Dordogne region of France. A graduate of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, she began her career as a painter before turning to photography in the early 2000s. This transition marked the starting point of a sensitive visual oeuvre, informed by a sociological, pictorial, and experimental approach.
Her first series, Identity, anchors her work in contemporary reality through portraits of teenagers taken with a large-format camera. With Strangers in the Light, she introduces a pictorial dimension to her images, borrowing from the chiaroscuro of the Old Masters to explore the impact of digital technology on light. Between 2013 and 2016, she created Looking for the Masters in Ricardo’s Golden Shoes, a series that examines the legacy of the great names in photography while questioning the future of the medium. In this series, she reinterprets iconic works from photographic history with a keen awareness of ongoing technological and cultural transformations. In 2017, the series Moods in a Room marked a deliberate return to painting. She experimented with the limits of the photographic medium through layering and textures, questioning the boundary between photography and painting. The interplay of transparencies, light, and materials reinforces an introspective and sensory approach to time and space. Since 2021, Catherine Balet has continued this exploration in the series Endless, where she examines the transformations of nature throughout the seasons.
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MAURICE BENNAYOUN
Maurice Benayoun is a French visual artist, curator, and theorist. After completing a dual degree in Fine Arts at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and in Modern Literature at Paris 4 Sorbonne University, he became a teacher, specializing in art, video creation, and new media from 1984 to 2002 at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. Simultaneously, he developed an artistic practice in digital art. Photography, video, installation, performance… his work is protean. For the past forty years, he has used a wide variety of tools as they have emerged: computer-generated imagery, virtual reality, robotics, artificial intelligence, and more. He earned his doctorate in Fine Arts and Art History in 2008 and became a lecturer at Paris 8 University the following year. Maurice Benayoun is the co-founder and artistic director of CITU (Création Interactive Transdisciplinaire Universitaire – University Interactive Transdisciplinary Creation), where he continues his research, creative work, and reflection on emerging media. In 2011, he founded H2H Lab (Human to Human Lab), a federation of laboratories and an organization dedicated to research in the field of new media and their aesthetic and social implications. In September 2012, he became a professor and researcher at the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong, where he taught for over ten years.