The first collaboration between artist Jean-Baptiste Decavèle and architect Yona Friedman, Balkis-Island portrays an imaginary island created between the two friends, made real by Friedman's architectural interventions over Decavèle's photographs of islands in the Arctic.  Named after Friedman's dearly departed dog Balkis, the island serves as a commemoration much like the practice of buying the naming rights of newly discovered stars--it's a naming of a place one will never personally experience.  Friedman and Decavèle bypassed the stars and made up their own composite of the varied vast Great North, where reductive, constellation-like images of Balkis adorn the landscape like ancient inscriptions.  The island is adorned with hasty architectural manifestations, to imbue these nameless, timeless landscapes with a sense of place and history.

The project began with a trip Decavèle took to the Bering Strait ten years earlier, his footage and documentation of the landscape strangely distant and unremarkable due to the "absence of temporal and historical referents"--in other words, the absence of interventions of humanity onto the landscape, the ruins and remnants of civilization.  He sent the pictures to Friedman, who visualized the islands as a possible site of one of his "Spatial Cities".  These landscapes became one fictionalized island, somewhat like the island of LOST, between time and space, existing only in memory and desire.  The island is mapped in the center of the gallery in a maquette, satisfying our desire to see a birds eye view and the topography of this imagined space.

Perhaps Asger Jorn is fresh in my mind because of the upcoming exhibition at the Pompidou, but the transparencies laid over the photographs remind very much of Jorn's détourned paintings, where he "updated" paintings found at flea markets with energetic, child-like abstractions, giving play to his desires and imbuing the works with a new significance.  Balkis-Island plays with the same compulsion, creating a geography of desire, a fictionalized history, one that has no clear beginning or end,  a form of freedom of imagination.  This is perhaps the utopia to escape to...

--Natalie Hegert

(*Images: Yona Friedman, Jean-Baptiste Decavèle, Balkis Island, March 14 - April 26, 2009; Galerie Anne Barrault, courtesy Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris.)