Adrien Missika

Photography, video, sculpture and installation are the mediums of choice of French-born artist Adrien Missika. Often seen as documental in nature, photography and video are perceived as being connected to the existence of objects in the world, given their referential and indexical nature, the photograph ultimately being perceived as a direct emanation of the real. Adrien Missika's image-centred work approaches how viewers perceive images and what they expect of them, playing on spaces between and on the borders of imagination and reality, the plausible and the implausible.
Not only an image maker, Adrien Missika is keen traveller, unable to live under house arrest. He appropriates travel in its myriad of historical and cultural forms - the Grand Tour, the pilgrimage, the walking vacation, travel as escape - gathering footage and visual material for his personal storehouse of "archetypes”: sunsets, grottos, mountain peaks, rock formations, waves, palm trees, architectures and mountain ranges. These images do not purport to recount journeys but are the make-up of a melancholic récit that bears multiple readings. According to Gaston Bachelard, "you dream the world before you know it”. Profoundly aware and weary of our depiction of the picturesque and our tendency towards confusing the map with the territory, Adrien Missika's work is intent on reflecting on our experience of the world through images. Nancy Dantas