Christian Lebrat's Self-Portraits: Accidents as Art

The Film Gallery in Paris, the world's first gallery dedicated to experimental cinema, has expanded its space and is now hosting "IDEM / Autoportraits," an exhibition of Christian Lebrat's self-portraits. Originally scheduled until April 2, 2020, the gallery is currently closed. Lebrat's self-portraiture is characterized by a deliberate embrace of technical accidents. His practice spans from his first self-portrait film, "Autoportrait au dispositif" (1981), to recent works made with an iPad. Lebrat works entirely in the dark, with no post-production, and often exploits the inherent flaws of his cameras. The exhibition includes series such as "Torses" (1986), where he performs a dance with light objects using a 6x6 camera on a tripod, and "Autoportrait ciselé" (2008), a 16mm film loop with a vertical scratch cutting through the portrait. His latest series, "Fragments" (2019), uses the panoramic function of an iPad to create horizontal glitches that disrupt the device's AI-driven image processing. Art historian Prosper Hillairet contributed an essay to the exhibition.