Louvre-Lens dedicates a solo show Power Coron to Bertille Bak, from May 24 to September 25, 2023. The exhibition brings together videos, installations and drawings by Bertille Bak from the end of 2000 to the most recent ones.
Native of Haut-de-France, a mine region, Bertille Bak shares a common history with Louvre-Lens, particularly anchored in the mine heritage of this territory and its habitants. Among different works related to the mine territory and labor, the exhibition includes Faire le mur, the video realized in 2008 in the mine district n°5 of Barlin in Pas-de-Calais, where the artists’ grand parents used to live and work, as well as the most recent projects Mineur Mineur and This Mine is Mine (2022), which Bertille Bak started to develop during her artist residency at Pinault Collection in Lens.
Simultaneously, Bertille Bak presents with Charles-Henry Fertin the project Les Galeries du temps, realized with Lens habitants on commission by the “Nouveaux commanditaires”, paying homage to the memory of the place.
Bertille Bak (born in 1983 in Arras, France) is a major female French artist famous for her anthropologically oriented dedication to observing ‘invisible’ societies in order to tell their often tragically charged stories. She does so with a lot of tenderness, evacuating her discourse beyond the stigma of judgment or of pure militancy. Instead, she chooses to “deal with”, creating with the people she meets whilst working on a project, a wholesome vision of their hidden worlds. Rather than denounce realities, she makes them felt. Although her artworks address such dark subjects as social injustice and poverty, they are usually filled with humor and derision: when hardships are too strong, one way of dealing with them is by self-distancing through laughter.
Numerous institutions organized personal exhibitions of her work, among the most recent ones: Merz Foundation in Torino, Italy (2022), la Criée – Centre d’art contemporain, Rennes, France (2022), Le Cyclop de Jean Tinguely, Milly-la-Forêt, France (2019).
In 2024, Le Jeu de Paume in Paris will dedicate a solo exhibition to her work.
