When I first saw the image of Ludivine Large-Bessette’s Blinded Wheels, a video installation from 2021/2022, it made me a strong special impression, and reminded me of the iconic scene from Chaplin’s film Modern Times, where a large machine has swallowed a worker sliding on the machine’s conveyor belt between the wheels. The sprockets, nuts, chains, gear etc. exhibit an irresistible aesthetic power and symbolism.
Ludivine Large-Bessette is a French artist who works at the intersection of video, photography and contemporary dance. She is said to “use the body as an object and motif to capture our desires for power and limits (artificial, physical, and normative). In this way, cinema techniques present themselves to her as a gateway to new writing and the creation of hybrid stories.” She often draws inspiration from historical and popular images that “support the construction of contemporary allegories that reverse the viewer’s position and our relationship to progress and power strategies”.
In Blinded Wheels Ludivine Large-Bessette says she explores the iconographic motif of the medieval Wheel of Fortune, as a symbol for constantly striving to gain control, and to develop ever more power. What is at stake here is the relationship to time, to existence, to tools, and to machines. And she poses the question: “To what extent could a form of humility, an acceptance of our limitations as humans, mitigate the harmful consequences of the perpetual race forward in which we are immersed?”
Blind Wheels (2022) tackles human beings’ ambivalent relationship with tools and technology. From technical prowess and its intoxicating speed, to its runaway speed that can lead to our own downfall, to what extent do we choose to be actors, subjects and responsible for the movement of this wheel, an echo of our cult of progress?
Chaplin made the same questions with his silent film!
Ludivine Large-Bessette
Ludivine Large-Bessette’s preferred mediums are video and photography. From a very young age, she was interested in the body and its representations. The discovery of contemporary dance marked a turning point in her practice as a visual artist. Today, she develops work situated at the intersection of these three disciplines, in which she regularly features dancers.
In her protean works, the image of the body becomes a mirror capable of unsettling and moving the audience. Whether by playing with historical images, focusing on physical sensations, or creating surreal scenes, her aim is always, through various means, to engage the viewer on the place of the body in our social interactions and its role in our contemporary environment. She affirms its importance and its divisive role in our relationship to ourselves and the world.
Her works are created and/or distributed in the photo and film festival circuit (Addis Foto Fest, Biennale Internationale de l’Image de Nancy, Filmwinter Festival for Expended Media Stuttgart, Instants Vidéo Marseille, Internationale TanzFilmPlattform Berlin), contemporary art (Salon de Montrouge, Aesthetica Art Prize York, Jeune Création, la Nuit Blanche Paris, Centre des arts d’Enghien-les-Bains) and contemporary dance (le Cent-Quatre Paris, Le Gymnase CDCN de Roubaix, Ballet du Nord CCN de Roubaix).
Blind Wheels (2022)
Single-channel video installation, variable dimensions, duration: 8 mins looped.
Blinded Wheels
Ludivine Large-Bessette
During the 2021 Nuit des Arts,
December 3-5, 2021
Also shown as part of the exhibition Call It What You Will, The Moment Has Its Own Dimensions at APT Gallery, March 2022.
https://www.artistsmovingimage.info/ludivine-large-bessette.html
