La face cachée de la Lune de Benjamin Kiffel

La face cachée de la Lune reveals a part of ourselves within a dreamy, sensory, and hypnotic journey. A metaphor for a decomposed, desolate, post-apocalyptic world.

After approaching chaos up to the brink of explosion and experimenting with the use of AI in his prolific 2024 project Hybridations, Benjamin Kiffel returns with a new proposition that leads us to La face cachée de la Lune.

In this new opus, the focus remains on chaos, but this time the photographer chooses to cast his gaze just after the catastrophe, at the moment when dust still floats in the atmosphere and the field of possibilities is wide open within a repetitive temporality with accents of eternity.

Here, he continues his reflection on the image by returning to a more conventional photographic practice, yet still subverting reality.

With La face cachée de la Lune, he returns to the night, hovering between dream and nightmare, to once again pause on the landscape—this time approaching it through a dialogue between portrait-format photographs and videos whose very slow movement borders on weightlessness.

All of this is rendered in a contrasted black and white. Presented on facing screens, this friction between photographs like landscape blades trickling down in an endless drip and looping panoramas whose images scroll past at a largo tempo is deeply unsettling.

This unsettling atmosphere is further heightened by the soundscape broadcast throughout the exhibition space. Conceived in the same way as the images through a subversion of reality, it resembles white noise, thereby recreating a spatial ambiance.

By stepping back during this lunar stopover, Benjamin Kiffel remains nonetheless down to earth: this universe imbued with great poetry, fragility, and beauty is ultimately just a pretext to show us contemporary society in a mise en abyme with a chaotic and desolate atmosphere.

The exhibition can be viewed from September 16 to October 24, Wednesday to Saturday, from 4:00 PM to 7:00 PM. Opening reception on Wednesday, September 16 starting at 6:00 PM. galerielapi