Biography

From S E B A S T I E N G O Y

Sébastien Goy (France, 1975) received a Master's degree in telecommunications and a Master of Advanced Studies in artificial intelligence and pattern recognition. He is currently a BFA candidate at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam.

Sébastien faces the arbitrariness of our visual culture with professional phlegm and a bit of anxiety. Some images deserve to be treated differently, he feels, because they retain a delicate significance, beyond his own emotional and aesthetic take. From his collection of photographs or video, some are simply poached and some made by him - these are usually contemplative registrations and straight snapshots. An approach he currently explores to preserve these images from assimilation into mute content is to give their constitutive absence a specific presence, to endanger their immateriality with a physicality.

Physicality is also preferred to come to terms with Authority - this aspiration is another salient aspect of his production, felt necessary to situate his artistic practice. Sébastien studies the forms Authority silently adopts in its political, scientific and artistic instances, the means of legitimation they deploy; he questions the relationships between these instances, investigates their collisions, their discursive cannibalism. These forms and means are then appropriated in performances, site-specific operations and drawings that oscillate between naive resistances against the powers that be, ironic bravados, critical plays on legitimacy and sheer détournements.