Christian Marclay

A leading contemporary artist, Christian Marclay is famous for his skilful video installations that revisit the history of cinema. For Doors, over a period of more than ten years, he selected and put together countless extracts from films of the 20th and 21st centuries. The complex editing contrasts with the simplicity of the subject: a succession of doors opening and closing. Each door passage corresponds to the cut point, the transition from one scene to another, from one actor to another. In an endless loop, Brigitte Bardot or Sidney Poitier are lost and found again, while film genres collide. An architectural and mental labyrinth, this immense collage, presented at the Cinéma Astor, challenges our memory and our cinematic experience, tirelessly pushing us into these seemingly dead-end spaces of connection.

Premiered in Switzerland, these six videos stretch the boundaries of the concept of street photography. While strolling around London, the visual artist Christian Marclay photographed objects discarded on the streets, collecting thousands of images of cigarette butts, bottle caps, chewing gum, Q-tips, plastic covers and drinking straws. He sequenced the snapshots like silent animation films at fast pace, creating the illusion of perpetual movement, like a flip-book. Projected on a giant screen in the hall of the Vevey train station, showing a different topic every day, the videos invited commuters to consider ordinary objects coming alive in an extraordinary manner.

When traveling, Christian Marclay president of the Grand Prix Images Vevey 2017/2018, photographed street musicians’ instrument cases with their few coins. Though silent, the images seem to carry a sense of sound, that of the absent instrument, the music being played and the tinkling of small change. For Festival Images, his Street Music, 2002-2012 series was dis-played in a train station underpass, a favorite spot for all kinds of musicians relying on the generosity of commuters. When he selected the venue for his photographs, the “visual artist of music” knew that they would end up as scores for local taggers. In addition to this project, the artist conceived Shuffle, a card game that the ensemBle baBel turned into a musical performance.