New in this edition of La Relève 8: art-cade*, Le Couvent/Juxtapoz, Sud Side, and Parallèle are joining forces to support the winning artist, Ix Dartayre, in producing and creating an in situ work within the Chapelle Noire of Le Couvent.

Blending photography, assemblage of collected elements, writing, installation, and performance, Ix Dartayre is a multifaceted artist who explores the sensitive relationships between images, bodies, and spaces, paying particular attention to the gestures and presences she invokes. Her installations thus become vectors of memory, intimacy, and connection, opening onto narratives that are both personal and collective.

With Mes sœurs, the artist develops, at the heart of the Black Chapel, a project that brings transfeminine narratives into resonance with the site’s spiritual history.
The title refers both to the term “sisters” used within the transfem community—sisters in life, struggle, and transition—and to the nuns who once inhabited the convent. From this dialogue emerge forms in which the intimate and the political, memory and the sacred, are interwoven. Working primarily with installation, image, and sound, the artist seeks to reinscribe voices, objects, and gestures within a space laden with symbolism, which she conceives as a living place—one to be traversed, inhabited, and transformed.