Zuzanna Czebatul, The Singing Dunes, centre d’art contemporain – la synagogue de Delme, 2020.
Zuzanna Czebatul operates mainly in the field of sculpture, creating pieces that blur the lines between commercial product, architectural relic and artistic production. Her work investigates complex relationships between the viewer and the viewed. She produces her own materials and creates works that deal with different themes representing strength or weakness, depicted in their opposed forms and with a certain sens of humor and kitschy eroticism. Her installations appear in turns collapsed, destroyed, deflated or fragmented and question concepts such as monument, public edifice and symbolic architecture. Reality and artificiality appear in her work in a constant exchange or dialogue in which she tries to expose the fluidity or flexibility of politics, the art market or the human body. Eventually, her work often addresses power structures, ideologies and politics and ask the question: how do we want to live?
At centre d’art contemporain – la synagogue de Delme, the artist will present his first solo exhibition in France, entitled The Singing Dunes. The title refers to a sound produced by the rubbing of sand grains as the dunes move through the desert. On this occasion, she will realize a monumental floor piece in situ, using the technique of Opus Sectile (an ancient artistic technique that uses marbles cut for the decoration of tessellations and inlays). It will absorb and depict the interior architecture of the synagogue through a trompe l’oeil, which visitors will be invited to tread as well as observe from the top of the first floor gallery. She will also present a series of sculptures
seeming excavated from the desert, both alluding to ancient temple ruins discovered by archaeologists of Hollywood film sets, where attitudes and symbolic forms of contemporary power meet. The architecture of the synagogue will become one of the fundamental pillars of the installations where nomadism, knowledge transformation, migration, alteration of architecture, evolution of beliefs, symbolic of the ten commandments will dialogue through the metaphor of the sand desert and its everlasting movement.