by Dominique Jacques

9th to 31st October 2020

10am – 12am 2.30pm – 5pm

U.F.O. Unidentified Found Objects

It is 2030, and over the past months, ten strange objects that seem to have emerged straight from the past have been found in Auroville. Miraculously reclaimed from the depths of old, forgotten cupboards and reappearing in the most unlikely of places, they are submitted to deep scientific scrutiny with surprising results. A mysterious energy emanates from these objects. But why they have been hidden and by whom, remains incomprehensible.

Such is the concept behind ‘U.F.O. Unidentified Found Objects’, Dominique Jacques’ new work which inaugurates the coming season of exhibitions at the Citadines Centre d’Art in Auroville. 

‘When I began this work about a year ago, I imagined a small group of spiritual seekers in the early 80s secretly transforming certain everyday objects of the period, and after having modified their waveforms to intensify their positive vibration and having imbued them with a specific power, concealing them in strategic locations with the aim of protecting and helping humankind, and Auroville’s inhabitants in particular, to face the growing challenges of the future.’ These objects had been chosen for their formal qualities and their symbolic significance.

The exhibition is therefore built around the discovery of these ten ‘magical’ objects. A fan, a pitcher, a transformer; each object is deconstructed by the artist in a playful and surreal manner. One can glimpse the ends of a lamp growing on the back of an old rotary phone, a typewriter generating colored radiographs, or a microscope emerging from a fossilized form bearing esoteric markings. Ten obsolete objects come back to life, speaking to us of the past and the future, playing with our imagination and causing us to rethink our relationships with the ‘things’ which surround us and what they reveal about ourselves. 

But the artist’s search does not stop there. Ten paintings are placed in dialogue with these found objects and express their occult essence. The paintings are vast and powerful, explicitly connected with the objects they represent as in a kind of digital scan which completes the vision of these ‘carcasses’, revealing their hidden wonder. It is as if these paintings offer a vision of the objects from within, filtered through a new gaze able to assimilate and understand their power.

The exhibition is concluded by a collection of documents which illustrate this project as a playful fiction: an old map of Auroville, showing the places in which these objects were hidden, an installation staging archaeological equipment of the future, and photographic and audio-visual documents depicting the authors of these discoveries.

The artist concludes that ‘the most interesting element has been the interaction with the individuals who interpret the discoverers of the objects, and the way in which they engage with the narrative. The stories which they recount, gathered in one of the exhibition’s videos, are the fruits of their imagination. They have entered into the game and have, in a sense, become an active part of the project.’ You are invited to come and see all of this, and everything that it will elicit in you, at the Citadine Centre d’Art from the 9th to the 31st of October.