Artists Statement

Exhibition
Musées de Soissons, Soissons, May 12-28

3.5 offers an immersion into a fascinating world. Its mediums are glass, video projection, drop shadows and sound, with their singular, ethereal materiality. The forms exhibited, oscillating between the mathematical abstraction of perfect polygons and the organic abundance of Kim KototamaLune’s “microcosms”, serve as a metaphor for our society – liquid, virtual, ephemeral – and its paradoxes with the body and physicality.

Glass, which the artist works with amazing virtuosity by spinning it into delicate networks, also appears to be an eloquent metaphor for our society. Firstly, through its material, silica, which it shares with the silicon used for most of the computer chips that flood our planet. By its transparency too, which responds to the ideology of our time and the glassy architecture of places of power. By its fragile strength, too. Solid, but brittle, like a system that is out of breath and that, every day, gives the feeling that it is in danger of breaking.

And finally, by its virtuality. Why 3.5? Because our bodies evolve in a three-dimensional space. And yet, the world is saturated with surfaces that overwhelm them. Screens, mixed, augmented or virtual realities add a layer of information to this three-dimensionality which, from then on, seems a little more. 3.5 is therefore a way of rendering virtuality, in all the thickness that the term has gained since the internet: the virtual as what is, but on the verge of not being; the virtual as a field of possibilities; the virtual as cyberspace.

Here is 3.5, an experience in the limbo of lesser existences, the mystical attempt to touch what is beyond our senses. 3.5 is the aesthetic response to a profoundly virtual society; it is the spirit of time encapsulated in the fragile transparency of glass, in the immateriality of the projected image and the shadows cast; so many fleeting, precarious moments that hold on to nothing. 3.5 is a microcosm, populated by organisms that seem to be aquatic, a small intra-uterine theatre, the interior of the body glitched by geometries too perfect to be natural.

Curators: Clément Thibault & Christophe Brouard

The “3.5” exhibition is the first large-scale museum monograph devoted to Kim KototamaLune, accompanied by his collective Bones and Clouds (Jean-Benoist Sallé and Stéphane Baz).

From https://www.ville-soissons.fr/les-musees-de-soissons/expositions-et-evenements/actuellement-2115/exposition-35-7191?cHash=b8bf7879c5bd818d503285111b8eafc5.html :
Enlarge image, .JPG 177Ko (modal window)
“3.5” is built around an unprecedented corpus of monumental glass works, using multiple techniques (spun glass, thermoforming, blowing), enhanced by light effects and video projections.
It offers an immersion in a fascinating world: the forms exhibited oscillate between the mathematical abstraction of perfect polygons and the teeming organic of Kim’s “microcosms”. The glass, which she works with astonishing virtuosity by spinning it in delicate networks, also appears as an eloquent metaphor for our society.
First by its material, silica, which it shares with the silicon used for most of the computer chips that flood our planet. By its transparency too, which responds to the ideology of our time and the glazed architecture of places of power.
By its fragile strength, too. Solid, but brittle, like a system out of breath which every day gives the feeling that it is in danger of breaking.

• Glass artist Kim KototamaLune (VN/FR) creates ethereal sculptures that resemble abstracted organic shapes and faces. She builds delicate glass grids without molds, which she then works into sculptural form and displays in darkened rooms. This presentation allows light to permeate, which both illuminates the sculptures from within and casts dramatic shadows on the surrounding walls. The artist was born in Vietnam and now lives and works in France, and has studied multiple languages. Cultural identity, the origins of life, and in-between spaces play into her inspirations. KototamaLune shares with Colossal that she seeks to create an “uncharted territory in order to engage in a silent dialogue with the ‘strangers’ living in us. Those sculptures arise from the will to recover within each of us what is common in our fetal origins. https://www.artnet.com/artists/kim-kototamalune/biography 
• Jean-Benoist Sallé (FR) Trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Bourges, then at EFET’s video and photography school in Paris, he developed his taste for scenographic and dramatic lighting techniques for the great painters of the French language obscure. https://www.tenarts.net/exhibitions/jean-benoist-salle-a-l-ombre-de-l-eden
• Stéphane Baz (FR, 1977) collaborated on experimental videos for plays and electro-rock groups. In 2013, continuing to explore the dark lands of humanity between reality and fantasy, he began filming “In Vino”, 20 min, produced by Insolence Productions. This film, evoking both the world of Roman Polanski and that of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, has been selected at festivals around the world: United States, Argentina, South Africa, Italy and Spain [Translated from French by Google Translate]. https://insolenceproductions.com/catalogue/stephane-baz