Ser Serpas: I fear (J’ai peur)

Ser Serpas takes over Gallery 3 to create a chaotic space brimming with tension, an unsettling scene for visitors who find themselves immersed in a hybrid zone that makes it seem as if they have stumbled into a space that is being built, and which is inspired by the idea of the attic. Her exhibition forms part of the season Mythologies américaines, which features work that goes against traditional cultures.

For the Bourse de Commerce, Ser Serpas has created a series of paintings and sculptures (covered in fabric) that are profoundly inspired by Alejandro Amenábar’s fantasy film The Others, especially when the voices of ghosts echo throughout the house, as if they were coming to inhabit its abandoned furniture and objects.

The scene of this exhibition, which also involves music (specially commissioned from Manchester artist Leyland Kirby, who revisits his emblematic project The Caretaker), cinema, and fashion, constitutes a veritable echo of how the artist has chosen to reconfigure the gallery space into a fantastical, ghostly site. New paintings by the artist hang from a metal curtain rod that traverses the entire space. Lying between abstraction and figurative representation, they reveal Serpas’ new tendency to dissolve the body as a way to express a loss of a grip on reality and the world around her.