By trying to make things disappear, censorship runs the risk of revealing them. By striving to erase embarrassing details, these become the focus of attention. Nathalie Rey’s installation CENSORED highlights this process of censorship, emphasising its paradoxical nature and the power dynamics associated with it
The artist offers a provocative approach, an ‘inverted censorship’ of these cycles of visibility/invisibility that invite us to question our own reactions to taboos. In believing that censorship is a thing of the past or a prerogative of theocratic or dictatorial regimes - a comfortable thought - the risk creeps in of forgetting that this mechanism is also at play today in our more liberal regimes, from public discourse down to the intimacy of our smartphones. As Michael Holquist established: ”To be for or against censorship as such is to assume a freedom no one has. Censorship is. One can only discriminate among its more and less repressive effects.” Not shying away from that reality, Nathalie Rey composes through her work a contemporary fable about the place of sex in the mechanisms of power of which all of us can become a cog.
The exhibition consists of the combination of three works: “The Censor, the censor’s son and the artist”, “Dominatio” and JCV.’s “Meta Community Standards”, a reaction to Nathalie Rey’s work.