Valérie Jouve

"It is through emotion that the photographic image engages spectators in this world. Not a soppy emotion but an emotion of power of the living through the bodies represented, and the body that will take up the space of the exhibition populated by these photo compositions/montages. After staying in Israel for a year, both in East Jerusalem and the autonomous Palestinian territories, Valérie Jouve presents a large visual composition which mixes montages of images with "the animated image" and the "documentary image". The artist focused on Arab communities and populations, by examining their relationship to the city and modernity. She makes the most of the space which is offered to her and endeavours to represent this reality by making it 'live' and 'feel'. "To re-enact a lived experience is, for Valérie Jouve, as important as expressing social, political, economic and urban issues."

This first personal exhibition by Valérie Jouve develops a reflection on the presence of mankind in the city. "I see this exhibition space as a large visual composition, which doesn't try to make this Arab world understood, but shouts out the lines and colours in an attempt to put the spectator in a physical state of tactility of this world".

Since the beginning of the 1990s, Valérie Jouve has built up a unique collection of photographic works on human presence in the city. For her exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, she is presenting around thirty photographs, taken in 2008 and 2009, outside the Western world.

In line with a photographic tradition close to that of the American, Walker Evans, Valérie Jouve captures figures between the documentary image and the staged image.

"To make felt what I feel. I don't want to make people understand." By this statement, from the Journal de Palestine published on the occasion of the exhibition, Valérie Jouve describes an intuitive approach. "En attente" ("Pending"), the title of the exhibition, evokes moments of rest, as well as the still poses which she demands of her "Characters". These are full-size photographs of men and women in urban settings: their frozen expressions and gestures, as if timeless, are more often than not magnified by a work of 'montage'. Furthermore, most of these photographs have been taken in the autonomous Palestinian territories that she doesn't represent directly, territories which are also "pending".

"My intention is also to frame a territory which is overflowing with existence, despite the media clichés", she says, adding: "I have to constantly distance myself. The images cannot do anything really, if not perhaps continue to bear utopias which light up my life." In the interview which follows, the artist goes back over her very particular approach, which makes her encounters with individuals the cornerstone of her work.