Alexandra Kawiak
With HOPE, a work she created during the summer of 2007, Alexandra Kawiak belongs to the new artistic attitudes where formal questions are just as important as the social and political dimension in present-day art.
The young French artist has produced a 3 metres long and 1 metre high piece of work made of 1000 jewellers’ labels with red threads each measuring 7cm.
The most immediately visible if not readable result is the English word HOPE. The typography used is the one you find in shop windows, more precisely on showcards.
One of the specific features of this work of art is that it is hanging from the ceiling, which forces the visitor to raise their head to see it. The artist has included in this presentation the current visual habit whereby in the street one often tends to look up to see the advertising. The vertical architecture of New York makes this even more true. Alexandra Kawiak “surfs” this habit. Her work is in the tradition of artists such as Pierre Huygue or Bruno Serralongue who give an active part to the spectator. The spectator is in action in front of this work which appeals to him, asks for a reaction, an exchange.
HOPE is almost certainly the huge hope that any artist feels when he is given the chance of presenting his art in New York. For a young artist who is watching society, it is also the promise of hope that any human being on our planet should have. We all know that reality is cruelly different and that one part of humanity has unfortunately lost all hope. Full of meaning, this work is also aesthetically political.
In the analysis one cannot leave out the metaphor of the consumer society irremediably conjured up by the labels of a product intended for those who can consume.
The world has changed, not only the art, in which we can see that avant-garde times are over. The Duchamp and the Klein, to name only these, have shaken the citadels and definitely cleared the ways between subjects, drawings, photos, installations. In the same way Alexandra Kawiak is an artist in step with her times, she moves with great ease amongst these subjects and has created here a relational installation, if not an event-art !
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[...] research, in which daily life is interwoven with the condition of migrants, presented together with Hope a site specific installation hanging from the ceiling. Full of meaning and sensitivity, using irony [...]