BY DOMINIQUE JACQUES
From 5 to 20 January 2024
Tuesday to Friday 2.30-5.30pm
Opening on Friday 5 January at 4.30pm
What is play if not theatrical staging? Putting reality aside for a moment, inventing other places, other rules, changing identities, as in role-playing games, those second lives where we swap our miserable selves for splendid avatars.
Games were one of mankind’s first abstractions, an allegory of our life courses as a training ground for strategizing, giving us the illusion of controlling our fate, perhaps even transcending it.
Games symbolize the antagonism between the living, it wants a winner, but allows for revenge.
If the universe is the creation of the divine which plays to know itself, then we are participants in this never-ending adventure. Each time our soul takes on a new body, we return to the arena to play a new game that will only end when we die.
It’s the field of experience, where we receive physical, geographical and character attributes, we learn, we have allies and enemies, we know victories and defeats, we rebel and take on challenges.
Are we just pawns during our passage on earth? Is the game rigged, or do we have the power to push back the limits and change the rules?
The game’s space is also one of dreams. It’s the realm of our imagination, of which we are still the lords, where we let in whatever enchants us most, where haunting memories sometimes visit us. Children, precarious magicians and relentless dreamers, still have access to spaces to which we have lost the key.
And that’s exactly what art is, a medium that gives us back the keys to the kingdom, an extraordinary game, that allows us to build new worlds, to try and change the rules of the game.
Dominique Jacques, December 2023
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born in France in 1965, Dominique Jacques has been living 25 years in Italy before moving to India in 2015.
After studying art and restoration in Paris, she started working as a restorer of frescoes and paintings, also working on her artistic creations which were occasionally exhibited in France and Italy.
Arriving in Auroville in 2015, she started collaborating with Art Service in the design of MAGZAV art magazine and with the Auroville Film Festival, for posters and communication.
On the occasion of the 50th Anniversary, Dominique exposed her Visible/Invisible project at the Centre d’Art Citadines.
In 2018/19 she held a series of workshops on contemporary art at CREEVA.
From January 2019 to April 2021 she has been part of the staff of Centre d’Art Citadines, as a curator.
In April 2022 she started a collaboration with Pitchandikulam artistic team, while she was working on her next solo exhibition that will be opened in January 2024 at Centre d’Art Citadines
