Confabulations

Artists

Marie Zolamian

Press release

“To paint is to inhabit those visible and invisible layers, to see a stratification being built where history and tradition deposit, dissolve, and reappear otherwise.” -  Marie Zolamian

Marie Zolamian’s work invokes constellations where interior geographies, fabulated presences and microhistories intertwine to form visual worlds operating between observation and imagination.  

Through painting, moving image, sound, drawing and site-specific work, Confabulations considers how memory is continuously reactivated and transformed, opening new routes towards shared imaginaries. 

Marie Zolamian’s pictorial universes echo processes of displacement, hosting and being hosted. She collects traces of encounters, apparitions and stories along her way, and inscribes them within new, fabulated environments. Embracing hybrid, collective, chimerical and intimate recollections, Zolamian reveals how memory is endlessly transformed, regenerated and morphed.   

Her paintings are inhabited by landscapes, architectures, figures and ornaments reminiscent of Eastern and Western iconographies — from medieval miniatures to prehistoric paintings; and from monumental frescoes to everyday offerings such as ex-votos. 

The exhibition heralds an artistic career spanning two decades, featuring a selection of iconic projects as well as newly commissioned works conceived in resonance with the specific context of WIELS. It encompasses paintings, assemblages, drawings, ceramics, video, site-specific mural paintings and a newly commissioned sound installation in which fragments of what the artist calls her “chosen exiles” come together in a polyphonic — at times cacophonic — composition. With this choral record made up of multiple voices, languages and stories, the artist invites us to rehearse dissonance as a generative space of togetherness.   

To coincide with the WIELS exhibition, a monographic book titled Le jardin sans soleil, focusing on Zolamian’s drawings and recent paintings, will be published by Posture Editions. With texts by Vanessa Desclaux and Anthony Hudek. 

Curator: Sofia Dati