A work from the immersive exhibition designed by students from Beaux-Arts de Paris at Espace Niemeyer, in dialogue with the architecture to offer a sensory and poetic experience around love and the memory of the place.
Alchimie, video installation, 2026 Alchimie presents an immersive installation within Espace Niemeyer, conceived as a perceptual laboratory where the image emerges from the darkness like a fragile presence, still in the making. The architecture becomes the support for a sensory experience, where the image does not reveal itself immediately but appears gradually. The installation explores love not as a represented subject, but as an invisible process of transformation. Through a large-scale video projection, it stages images created from photograms, a camera-less technique based on direct contact between light, matter, and gesture. The image thus comes into being as a reaction, an imprint in the process of forming. The projection, made with an ultra-short-throw video projector, covers the entire surface of a wall. Slowly mutating organic forms, between liquid and light, unfold there without ever becoming fixed. Their reflection on the floor extends the image and creates a perceptual instability, blurring the boundaries between the real and the immaterial. A diffuse red light transforms the space into an immersive environment, both laboratory and intimate space. The forms oscillate between several interpretations, chemical reactions, neural flows, cosmic landscapes, playing on an ambiguity of scale, from the microscopic to the macroscopic. The viewer does not observe an image, but witnesses an apparition. They are immersed in a slow temporality, where something forms without ever stabilizing. The projection becomes a threshold between the visible and the invisible. Light does not show: it reveals. Visuals: The three visuals are photos of my process of creating my photograms in the photo lab. Iryna Shevelova was born in Kiev, Ukraine. A painter, she graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts et d’Architecture de Kiev and is currently a student in the Filière Fresque et Art en situation at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris and at université Paris 8. A project co-produced as part of an educational partnership with the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, with the participation of Espace Niemeyer.
Source: paris.fr — photo: © Iryna Shevelova