by photographer and film-maker Fabien Vilrus and fashion designer Nicolas Guichard
curated by Juan Corrales
Balice Hertling project space
47 rue Ramponeau, Paris
La Kaz (home in Reunionese Creole) is an exhibition of works by photographer and film-maker Fabien Vilrus and fashion designer Nicolas Guichard who were both born on Reunion Island. The show explores and questions the access native people of the island have towards creative domains in visual arts. The exhibition presents the viewer with an understanding of their community and dismantles the narrow conception of their culture that France and the Northern Hemisphere have towards them. For the series of photographs La Kaz, Vilrus and Guichard traveled to Saint-Paul in the western part of the island during the summer of 2019. They photographed groups of locals, observed traditional homes, and related feeling the danger of losing the local cultural values and history.
La Kaz is curated by Brazilian stylist and artist Juan Corrales, co-founder of the art publishing collective Bouquet Magazine. Corrales’s work is an ongoing questioning of fashion, not only as a medium of expression and consumption but also a place to dialogue and to give access to dissident bodies and visions through questioning the common standards of aesthetic and of thinking, thus proposing a documentary and social view of images, either exaggerating it or repositioning it. This is their second time curating an exhibition at Balice Hertling.