Isabella Hin
Fight or Flight - Installation - 2021
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 23
Installation
Fight or Flight is an experimental, sensorial, emotional, installed film. The installation, which is like a tableau vivant – animated, aesthetic –, is designed to bring about a sensation of immersion. It goes back over unhabitual and unconscious, liquid memories shared by the man and woman who, in turn, perform breast-stroke movements in the air. Going from suspension to immersion and back. The film is inspired by the rigorous principles invented by Paul Beulque in Tourcoing in 1913 to teach swimming. The learners are supported by a belt/swing and plunged into water where they repeat the swimming movements they have learned out of water. The support allows the swimmer to survive in theirs new environment. Suggesting a to and fro between respiration and drowning/asphyxia, the film draws attention to the human inability to breathe underwater and desire for emancipation by means of swimming and flight. The emphasis is on division and duality/couples, flight and depth, air and water, joy and sorrow, mastery and loss of bearings, constraint and freedom, separation and reunion, lightness and heaviness, the verticality of bodies and their horizontality, oxygen and asphyxia, acceleration and calm, memory and forgetting, consciousness and unconsciousness, life and death, and possible resurrection/transformation. With each immersion one person’s body is steeped in another’s, offering a new kind of reunion.
Isabella Hin
Isabella Hin develops the duality between the fixed image linked to the photographic medium and the movement of fluids. She underscores the changing qualities of liquids, the way they modify our perception, and links images together. She is interested in the enigmatic and elusive character of water, particularly dark water, in order to link memory and recollections that are themselves changing all the time. Born in 1993 in Paris, where she works, Isabella Hin graduated from the Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2017. A winner of the Agnès b Prize, she has exhibited her work, notably, at the Musée Nicéphore-Niépce, at Paris Photo, and at the Parcours Photo-Saint-Germain. She is currently working on a photographic commission made by CIPGP 2021 on the subject of the River Marne.
