Maxime Chabal
Title: Nitrogen Narcosis
Material: Lead casting, Galvanized steel
Year: 2022
About:
“I always wondered how to recall a space where nothing can be seen,
Small touches of light making it invisible
It’s all made of hidden structures, weird fishes that don't know that we exist and water that flows as quick as my nervous system gets pressured.
The pressure comes from the pipes, it brings up the oil and keeps the machine functional.
The pressure comes from all points, any cardinal point that drives me to any direction.
It’s not about being lost, it’s about trying to find those lost places.
What’s hidden is the most exciting, it’s something that hasn’t been deformed yet”

Bio:
Maxime Chabal is a french artist based in Hamburg, he’s currently studying his masters in the sculpture departement of the HFBK. His research is at the edge of the body, an anxious body, sculpted from within. Performance played a crucial role in the developemment of his practice but he recently started to invoke corporeality and physicality through absence and desembodiement. Based on the idea that structures of control are internalized at the heart of the metabolism, he analyzes the implications between the medical appartuses, some physiological and psychological processes and the history of health. His research led him to collaborate with scientifics and choregraphers in order to explore complex interactions linking humans and non-humans agents. Operating through an aesthetic that may at first appear mute and clinical, he attempts to break the silence of this ambient minimalism by integrating emotion and vulnerability into the very heart of the materials he mobilizes.