The Banquet

As part of the Family Matters exhibition, the Boghossian Foundation invites you to discover the work of Ariane Loze, The Banquet.

The artist, director and actress solicits the public to partake in her play for an evening. Around a table, twelve people chosen from the public each play one of the characters imagined by Ariane Loze. On the plate, as a starter, are the words of one of the characters they are going to play. The actors engage in an unexpected game where strangers come together to create a unique performance. Getting into the mind of someone, leaving oneself for a few moments and inhabiting the psychic space of another person, is what Ariane Loze practices through her art, with her videos. Through this performance, she invites the spectator to do the same and to realise what Arthur Rimbaud first synthesized brilliantly with this brief, contradictory yet splendid formula: “I is another“.

The performance is conceived in echo with the video work The Banquet. As in the video Chez Nous presented in the exhibition Family Matters, the artist diverts and re-enacts the codes of cinema to take a critical look at the structures of contemporary social life.

Ariane Loze (Belgium, 1988) is a video artist and performer. Since 2008, she has been developing videos that present a multiple and fluid vision of identity. Mastering all aspects of the production process, the artist is in turn director, editor, camerawoman and actress. Her short fictions are filmic essays on our society, its individualism and complexity, and the contradictions that inhabit us. Ariane Loze made the video Décor during her residency at the Boghossian Foundation in 2017. Her work is currently and in the coming months at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, the Garage in Mechelen, the Cultural Centre in Strombeek, the Michel Rein Gallery in Brussels and in Paris simultaneously.

Special thanks to the Kanal Foundation for the loan of the work.