Valérie Horwitz

While Valérie Horwitz has been using photography daily since 2009, she is usually partial to developing her artistic work in relation to the contexts in which it is set. And while images are a recurring element in her work, poetic writing, archive images, video and publication also play an active part in her practice. Her projects are mainly the result of extended periods of work undertaken in contexts linked to detention (prisons, transit camps…).
In her collaborations with incarcerated women and minors, she searches for spaces of resistance and resilience. And when architecture is featured, it is shown as a structure made to control bodies. The artist first started out by documenting the feeling of being trapped inside her own ailing body, using her autobiographical photographic work as a witness to the fragility and “impermanence of life”. Valérie Horwitz’s entire body of work highlights the reality of constrained bodies and strives to imagine the conditions of an escape, a resistance to any and all forms of submission.