Artist's book.
Où suis-je is a collection of penetrating glimpses into the architectural landscapes of Anne-Lise Coste's
childhood as they have morphed and reassembled in her mind over time. However filtered and abstracted by memory, these drawings revisit the actual hospitals and infirmaries in which Coste resided as a child during in-patient treatment for an asthmatic condition. They reflect the paradoxically exact and yet imprecise way in which memory replicates details, and the persistence of certain images that remain engraved in our minds.
Où suis-je is a key to comprehending Coste's work, not only for its autobiographical insights, but also for its demonstration of the expansive way in which Coste uses line and text to meditate on loss, longing, and location.
Anne-Lise Coste (born 1973 in Marseille, France) lived in Marseille and in Zurich, Switzerland, before moving to New York where she now lives and works. Her drawings and texts have the immediacy of graffiti, and allow her to express subjective moods mixed with political criticism and literary sentences. With a
dada-influenced language and intensely lyrical images, her work exudes irony, rebellion and emotion. She creates seemingly decorative compositions that actually offer us a catalogue of contemporary anxieties, where the immediacy of the gesture of drawing combines a strong poetic sense with an element of social critique.
