On the occasion of Paris Photo, the Area Paris gallery is pleased to invite you to the opening of its new exhibition entitled Amorces, in which we will showcase a series of photographs by Kostia Hernain Debain. Organised as a triptych, Kostia Hernain Debain's photographs invite us on a journey between Ukraine, Uruguay and Japan.
The artist's words
« Born in Ukraine, I was taken in at three months old by an orphanage in Donetsk, before being adopted and growing up in Paris. Today I present three works that form a loop: three journeys, three approaches, one and the same movement towards origin.
First there was a country that war closed off to me. For Contre-courant, I retraced the route from a distance, on Google Earth, from Snijne to Kyiv, gathering the voices of those who could tell me about it. A return without a body, made of screens, stories, and places one touches with a fingertip without reaching them. A documentary approach, but of a dreamed reportage, on the border between the true and the false.
Then, in Uruguay, with Fragments de mémoire, I moved away from the real to head towards the sensitive. In the countryside around Montevideo, the landscape dissolved into light and shadow: a presence more than a subject, a mirror of inner feelings. The journey became inward, the photography more abstract.
Finally, Contre-courant led me to Kyotographie, in Japan. An obvious link was created when I discovered that Kyiv was twinned with Kyoto. The loop closed: what I had not been able to reach in Ukraine, I found again by a detour, in a sister city of the capital that I had left as a child. There, the journey was no longer an image: I walked the streets, camera in hand, and the series Kyoto-Tokyo was born from that reality, captured in passing, through wanderings and discoveries.
Between the concrete and the sensitive, reportage and abstraction, my work always oscillates between these two ways of seeing. These three series are its stages, and together they draw a single path: that of a return to the sources that passes through elsewhere. »
Kostia Hernain Debain