The Middle East, non-internationally-recognized countries, radioactive or forbidden zones considered as “involuntary nature parks” are all territories that Louis-Cyprien Rials has visited or inhabited. The artist, born in Paris in 1981, uses video, photography and sculptural installations to present a silent, sometimes mystical image of areas marked by past violence or troubled by major conflicts. His moving pictures, composed of fixed shots, often long and devoid of human presence, tell of the impossibility of capturing these spaces that have been abandoned, transformed, imbued with beliefs and riddled with stigmata.

Fondation, 2023

Fondation is the result of a two-year search of the US Army’s Iraq War photo archives (2003 – 2011). 160 of the 188,000 images consulted were selected and printed on slides. They are projected onto two synchronized Kodaks Carousels, to offer a new narrative to these images. Indeed, it seems that Iraq is doubly responsible for the founding of worlds: firstly, through the invention of writing, city-states and legal codes, and secondly, in a more paradoxical way: through two wars based on lies, Iraq is also at the origin of, or at least an early manifestation of, what many of the world’s leaders and powerful have called for – a new world order. It’s also about preserving a digital memory on a tangible, preservable document, and exhibiting it in a mixture of Arab “diwan” and Western court.

Babel, 2023

For centuries, man believed that the ruins of Borsippa’s Ziggurat were the remains of the Tower of Babel, only to discover that he was mistaken. The work thus comprises a video, a photograph and these documents proving that if there’s one thing human, it’s error, while at the same time a necessary reflection on man’s ever-present desire to equal God – this time through artificial intelligence and transhumanism.

Tasawuriy, 2023

Tasawuriy” is a series of Polaroids about a fictional Middle Eastern country, the images of which have been produced since the start of Ramadan using an artificial intelligence, Midjourney, V5. The process involved in making this work goes from inventing an Arab country, its history and geography, to producing a photographic report, using Midjourney, and printing it on Polaroids.