Chris Korda in his ropes at Circuit

Exposition

After her shock activism in the name of the planet, the American is creating a place for herself on the contemporary art scene, with immersive works to be discovered in Lausanne.

Wherever she goes, including at the Circuit Contemporary Art Center in Lausanne, the artist Chris Korda, with her 1930s cabaret-style wig, is preceded by a whiff of sulfur. Transgender for reasons of gender balance, the American, an antinatalist activist in order not to further aggravate the environmental fate of planet Earth, sick with overpopulation, did she not found "The Church of Euthanasia" in Boston in the 1990s?

Trash as much as burlesque, the outings of his band of preachers intend to shake up the ambient conservatism as precursors of whistleblowers! Simple language. Direct. Exacerbating the obvious.

In Lausanne, this section is discreet. Concentrated on a single screen that broadcasts her clips and in particular the one where the musician, with a synthesizer voice, "apologizes to the future". The rest of the exhibition, rather than monopolizing the mind with decisive issues, it takes it with it. And lets it slow down, languish. With thoughts suspended, it dilutes itself in aesthetic, technological, acoustic, formal research of a total artist. Educated in cultural circles but above all trained in electro, techno music and devoted to the instruments she makes for herself.

"If Chris Korda is often defined by her activism, this overshadows her other plastic activities and the idea was to give space to her aesthetic contribution which also rubs shoulders with extremes. This time... creative. To probe them, explains Matthias Sohr, curator of the exhibition, she works with software of her invention, one acting on the music, the other generating the forms, including the increasingly deformed vases that we see here." Everything becomes possible

They are the ones, ectoplasms that change infinitely to summon eras, cultures, styles, artistic references or even parallels with the plant, human and animal kingdoms, who form the nerve centre of this exhibition. Refined. As much as an invitation to let go.

Before our eyes, in our breathing zone, these species of a new kind, these creatures jostle, psychedelic, and make the collective memory waltz in what it masters. Or not. Or more! We see these ceramics in photos, hung on the walls. Or in 3D while we wander in their universe, and by extension in their amniotic fluid, thanks to a virtual reality headset.

When we talk about immersive art – a fashion phenomenon that draws crowds to more or less luminous shows! – it is here in its true bath, more hallucinatory than spectacular, created and brought to life in all its complexity by a contemporary artist who has made the machine an ally that she humanizes. Unless it is the other way around? With Chris Korda as a geek programmer pushing her investigations into the realms of the impossible, everything becomes possible.

Florence Millioud Henriques
Lausanne, Circuit
Until February 11th
Tue to Sat (2 p.m.-6 p.m.)
www.circuit.li

The preceding is a translation. The original language is here.