As Marie Losier’s latest feature film, “Peaches Goes Bananas” (a portrait of queer and feminist icon Merrill Beth Nisker aka Peaches, filmed over a 17-year period) hits the screens, the art centre le Transpalette is devoting its first solo exhibition to her (co-produced with La Creux de l’Enfer).

The artist is best known for her 16mm films, which have been the subject of retrospectives at MoMA in New York and the Jeu de Paume in Paris, but there are few opportunities to see the diversity of media she manipulates. In Bourges, where the ‘Bandits-Mages’ association, dedicated to supporting video creation, offers her support and loyalty, this exceptional exhibition presents the range of Marie Losier’s experiments in a place that has become mythical for its history linked to that of the struggle for a utopia pulsating with punk energy. So it comes as no surprise to hear « Hooky Wooky » borrowed from Lou Reed, the title of this exhibition that fuses the DNA of this cultural wasteland with that of Marie Losier, while setting the tone for a journey that has been underway for over 20 years. Visitors are invited to cross spaces, pass through the mouths or between the eyes of custom-made curtains, to share a great journey that begins in New York in the 2000s, when Marie Losier goes to meet the family she has chosen, that of the underground scene. The space unfolded here is measured according to a time that stretches to fit the scenarios of the meetings, her stagings and the financial ups and downs. This practice gave rise to collage, the driving force behind the process. On her arrival in New York, Marie Losier picked up a Bolex camera, which she would carry with her all her life and which would condition her relationship with the world, the weight of the tool in the operator’s hands and her relationship with the body. All her art is dedicated to her curiosity about the play of the body, gender, transvestites and the fantasy of the situations she encounters in the studios where she finds her place making sets. In fact, it’s through a large set that she lets us in under the Transpalette glass roof, « Kino Volcano », a souvenir of the filming of a video clip she has just finished with the group of musicians ARLT. The means at hand can sometimes lead to inventions. In « Mary Go Round », for example, a large exquisite corpse drawn on several sheets of rice paper unrolls a long snake emerging from a camera to capture strange chimeras that can be found in all the cinematographic moments presented here, whether they are placed in screens at the back of boxes shaped according to the atmosphere or broadcast on a cinema screen. In a small landscaped box lined with green moss, « Félix au Paradis », electronic music composer Félix Kubin converses with animals found on the film set of an animal trainer nestling in the heart of the Cher. On the first floor, the cubicles are lined up like little individual cinemas. A large kaleidoscopic eye, bearing the emblem of this legendary alternative rock band, allows the viewer to slip into the « The Residents » box to see a video composed from rushes of the film that Marie Losier shot during the musicians’ European tour. The hours accumulated over expansive shooting periods and not used for the long form of the film take their place in these boxes, reminiscent of the beginnings of cinema in funfairs. All the situations filmed, drawn and even photographed create spaces of freedom, of holidays outside social codes, where bodies are metamorphosed, objects animated, like the camera which becomes a toothed and hairy animal, represented in ceramics which transforms all the cinema instruments into soft and swarming forms gathered on a table but which also come to animate the space of the walls in the middle of a photographic gallery composed in a broad fresco of burlesque situations alongside costumes and accessories. It’s Such a Perfect Day, a photograph of a deleted scene from “Peaches Goes Bananas”, is presented as a stand-alone work, demonstrating this constant interweaving of moments experienced as well as presented. The art centre is used to presenting rare works such as all the photographs ever exhibited, but it is also not neglecting the pleasure of the cinema, which is behind Marie Losier’s « obscure object of desire », with an hour-and-a-half programme of clips and short films.

Transpalette, Antre peaux, Bourges, until 31 August 2025.

3 June at 8.15pm, Maison de la Culture, Bourges: Screening of « Peaches Goes Bananas », Marie Losier’s latest and third feature film, in her presence.

antrepeaux.net

@antre.peaux

@losier.marie