Noemie Keren

Statement

Graduated from the École des Beaux Arts de Bordeaux, Noémie Keren draws on various areas related to alternative thoughts, irrational phenomena that she finds in art history, mythologies, New Age beliefs, sciences, languages, philosophies, fairytales... Noémie Keren is positioned as heiress of Starhawk, Jodorowsky and the eco-feminism movements. She tries through her work to become the household witch : using washing powder to draw big size symbols on the floor, the performances are witchcraft rituals. Engaged in a fight for all the living, using toxic washing powder is a provocation to all this daily acts who seems without consequences. Her work on gesture in the field of performance guided her to explore calligraphy practise. By words and symbols, calligraphy allows her to give a shape to sacred thought in a ritualized practise.

Work

Magie Verte

Exhibition view, installation Gestation (performance with washing powder) and Paroles de Sorcières Ménagère (serie of calligraphies and night dresses).

Sphères d'influences

Calligraphy serie, alchemical symbols, ink on paper, 2020.

Paleo-Spiritism

Series of ink drawings on paper.

Spell Bombing, performance

I'm a household witch, I've got power and I use it.
Spell Bombing, February 16th 2019, Tribunal de Grande Instance, Bordeaux.
"Witches are reenchanting the world", white embroidery on black felted wool.

We are the ancestors of tomorrow

Spell, natural dyeing, embroidery, wood. Spring 2019.

Flight

Photographic diptych, performance trace of Flight. Spring 2019.

Zugarramurdi

Series of pictures taken during my pilgrimage to Zugarramurdi, March 21, 2019, to honor the memory of women accused of witchcraft.

NWWO

Ritualized conference in the city of Bordeaux. The intention is to give the opportunity of reviving a historical awareness of a mortifying phenomenon often relegated to the background, the witch hunt. www.nwwo.fr

Pictures : C. H. P.

Lugnasad, video

This short video shows how Noemie Keren is using the washing powder to draw on the floor during her performances.

Performance, costume, accessories, video editing - Noémie Keren
Music, realisation - Amaury Michaux

Gestation, performance

Created for the exhibition là où les sentiers naissent invited by Ymi Nigris, Gestation is a ritualised performance, during 30 minutes. On a music created by Gaëtan Chrétien, Noemie Keren draw a big symbol in front of the audience using a funnel and washing powder. The dark rug and the white washing powder are creating strong contrast, gestures are evoluating by the rythm of the draw, letting little by little a shape half-tree, half-womb appearing.

Performance, costume and accessories - Noémie Keren
Music - Gaëtan Chrétien
Help for installation - automatisation of decor and lights - Kévin Dumas

Purification, performance

Created for the sixth edition of the Festival Récidive (September 21st-22nd 2015) and presented at the Atlantic Manufacture of Bordeaux, Purification is a ritual performance that tries to question our relationship on what is healthy in a bacterial-free and sterilized world. By achieving an immaculate mandala with laundry powder, the idea is to reconnect with the symbolic and spiritual issues that contain daily sanitizing gestures. This thirty-minute performance invites the audience to penetrate the mysteries of washable, allowing themselves to be absorbed by the concentration and precision of the gestures that the performer unfolds. In between mythological creature, and ancient priestess, Noémie Keren appears gradually in a meditative atmosphere supported by a sound created by Gaëtan Chrétien. From darkness to light, a progressive experience of contrasts, where the olfactory is solicited throughout the drawing. Purification, or a dialogue between archaic, archeological, mythological and contemporary, the healthy, the sanitized.

Performance, costume et accessoires - Noémie Keren
Création sonore et vidéo - Gaëtan Chrétien

Vénus + MLV, installation

Vénus + MLV is an installation created during an artist residency in Oberpfalzer Künstlerhaus, Schwandorf-Fronberg, Germany, april 24th - may 29th 2015. The idea is to put in perspective a world of sain and sanitized, symbolised by the wahing machine and a world of the origins, symbolised by graphics references to prehistorics art in dark caves.

Waschmaschine trifft Venus und Maibaum
Oberpfalznetz, 21 mai 2015

Venus und die Waschmachine
Oberpfalznetz, 21 mai 2015

Neo Wisdom Witches Ompahlos, installation

This installation tries to reveal the mirror relation between the greenhouse and the museum : in both cases, the audience can watch elements of collection, alive but captured, gathered in a dispositif of classification. Each element is named, dated, and benefits of a special space, involving a way of being for the spectator as seeing without touching. That's what Giorgio Agamben calls "sacred".

Exhibitions

Sorcières, exhibition, concerts, performances

Monségur (33), April 30th 2020 (postpone)

Magie Verte, exhibition

Espace 29, Bordeaux (33), October 1st-31th 2020
Exhibition book : Magie Verte - Video view of the exhibition : Magie Verte

Magie Verte, ecofeminist reconquest of witches

Conference with Anne Querrien, Suzanne Husky, moderator : Vanessa Desclaux
Performance in Espace 29 after the conference.
Espace 29, Bordeaux (33), March 10th 2020
Listen the podcast (french)

Equinoxe, performance