Stéphanie Nava

Born 1973 in Marseilles, Stéphanie Nava lives and works in Marseilles and Paris.
“We could say that, as a whole, my work is narrative in form. Beyond the fact of presenting an account, what interests me about stories is the way in which they articulate their constitutive elements. Representing a story means putting together a montage of different components: locations, objects, characters, all of them brought together by means of postures, gestures, distances. For me this is the place where reflection, or the “conceptual” aspect of the work, comes into it, in the assemblage that bears the meaning. Grasping an image or a story project comes down to using it to devise a whole array of meanings, theoretical propositions that go far beyond it”.
“I am interested in systems (like the child who dismantles the clock to see the cogs inside), and my work involves examining how they produce a discursive potential that can be embodied in a poetic form and, in terms of drawing, in an active image. The formula of Giordano Bruno from which the title of the exhibition is taken, ‘intelligere est phantasmata speculari' (literally translated as ‘to think is to contemplate visions', it may also be read as ‘to think is to speculate on images') sums up for me this desire to implement, through images (and, by extension, stories) the outcomes of my modest explorations, disassemblies and reconciliations”.
—Stéphanie Nava