Isabelle Hayeur

As an image-based artist, Isabelle Hayeur is known for her large photographs and her experimental videos. She has also realized several site-specific installations and public art commissions. Her work is situated within a critical approach to the environment, urban development and to social conditions. She is particularly interested in the feelings of alienation, uprooting and disenchantment.

Since the late 1990s, Isabelle Hayeur has been probing the territories she goes through to understand how our contemporary civilizations take over and fashion their environments. She has mostly documented altered landscapes, industrial areas, tourist sites, abandoned places, suburbs and underprivileged regions. She is concerned about the evolution of places and communities in the neoliberal sociopolitical context we currently live in. Her artistic approach examines the relations between nature and culture in a world where their (false) opposition is a dominant ideology that still structures our Western societies. When the utility principle comes to prevail over all other values and the economy becomes sovereign, everything gets viewed as a “resource” to strip or a site to occupy. Her works seek to show how we take possession of territories and beings so as to adapt them to our needs; this instrumental logic tends to invade all fields of human activity today. Her art practice proves to be both political and poetic, with a constant striving to cover her tracks in order to highlight the ambivalence of our relation to the world. At once seductive and disquieting, her images awaken in us an ambiguous feeling that reflects our discomfort and reveals the flaws of a dehumanized system.

Submitted by Galerie Hugues Charbonneau