QWA > Sofi Hémon & Inna Maaímura (FR)

The artists in residence duo are working on a parallel site-specific installation in the Anthropos Pavilion and its exterior. The project is a trialogue between the museum collection, the architecture of the building and contemporary art. The artists’ intervention will comprise several parts – an immersive sound installation, an installation in space expressing respect for archaeological excavations and also displaying artifacts collected during the research period. The museum galleries on the first and second floors feature QWA works materializing archaeological concepts, dreams and reality, orientation and disorientation, and the representation of landscape, humans and animals.

Magnetic North, East (SCOTT#4)
An immense territory – both geographic and poetic, endless areas traversed by Pleistocene animals – opens among the attractive forces of the cardinal points. The North is an absolute, theoretical point, a point of reference and orientation; Magnetic North duplicates it, but also creates a deviation, a space of difference and attraction (magnetic). The North conceals Palaeolithic landscapes and animals; the last mammoths became extinct in this north-eastern symbolic direction, on Wrangler Island at the north-eastern edge of Siberia, at a time when humans were building great pyramids… As to the East, it is relative: One can reach the North (a theoretical point), but never the East. The East gets lost under the footsteps of the walker. Similarly, we exist among factual and objective data and an endless poetic space, vanishing, distant, receding and disappearing in the distance. These are the polarities among which we try to determine a path, open a field, a poetic space between today and the lost past. This is one of the links associating archaeologists and artists. The “North-East” thus represents directions and territories – symbolic and real – the poetics of a dark land [terre obscure], the traces of which we try to uncover as artists-archaeographers, and to follow its paths.

Exhibition: Magnetic North, East (SCOTT#4)
Curator: Martina Lázničková-Galetová
Venue: Moravian Museum, Anthropos Pavilion, Pisárecká 273/5, Brno
Dates: 9 October – end of December, 2018

Binom QWA are the two French artists Sofi Hémon and Inna Maaimura. They use this name to sign their joint artistic project titled SCOTT.

SOFI HÉMON (1962) lives and works in Morangis, France. She studied at the Arts Appliqués and Beaux Arts in Paris. She uses different artistic means: installation, performative installation, action, drawing with digital image, and she often develops conditions for cooperation between artists. http://www.sofihemon.net

INNA MAAÍMURA (1972), a visual artist living and working in Dordogne, France. He graduated in philosophy and art. He has worked in several artistic groups. He is art director of the Mydriase ensemble. His work deals with installation, performance and poetry. http://inna-maaimura.tumblr.com

The residency takes place in cooperation with the Moravian Museum.