"The title of the exhibition, Deux vérités, un mensonge (Two Truths, One Lie), is borrowed from a team-building exercise that involves distinguishing between truth and falsehood by guessing which of three stated facts is a lie. Presented for the first time in the form of an installation, the film Peak Performance (2024) features seven characters who evolve in a space (between an office, storage area, or art gallery) that changes over the course of team-building and cohesion exercises, improvisations, and shared professional life stories. In such a setting, play and work intermingle with perspectives, disappointments, and desires for progress and existence through individual speech and collective gestures.

The film is the central element of the exhibition, while some of the research material for the film is displayed as evidence: masks, drawings incorporating archive images, a 360-degree video, and even props and some costumes that place us on an equal footing with the film’s protagonists, as if we were becoming them. The straw, in which each of the film’s characters seems to be searching for something, accentuates the disconnect between the reality of a mostly dematerialised job and the desire to be at one with nature. Team-building exercises are renewed in improvised, unscripted scenes, blurring sincerity and performance. Pauses, transitions, and peripheral gestures are preserved. Role-playing creates a unique, porous body that breaks down the boundaries between cinematic fiction and the material reality of space, a porosity intensified by the presence of these more or less visible signs.

Like the house of cards from the role-playing game featured in the exhibition, our professional lives require us to play the role of tightrope walkers, constantly replaying or even reinterpreting our roles. The characters discuss how their bodies conform to the workplace through dress codes. Their own wardrobes allow them to evaluate and understand the models of those who employ them. The costumes contribute to this disconnect; they do not really belong to them and contribute to a form of opacity, of indeterminacy, like a floating space where identity remains suspended.

In this theatre, emotions become tools, personal stories become material to be shaped, and the collective becomes a backdrop to be maintained. It relies on belief systems: storytelling, motivation, shared vision, corporate culture. And the stories unfold between material realities and imaginary constructions: underpaid odd jobs, a fish canning factory, artificial landscapes, eternal snow, thick curtains, a bed to throw oneself onto, schedules to check.

The exhibition Deux vérités, un mensonge transforms the viewer into a potential participant who, in turn, enters into a game that reflects the very conditions of contemporary workers, who are required to “perform” their commitment and demonstrate their enthusiasm and adaptability in all circumstances. In this endless cycle and from this laboratory of behaviour, straw scratches and intrudes everywhere, nightmares lurk, words are distorted from mouth to mouth, speech and bodies conform. And while waiting for a well-deserved rest or a forbidden break, personalities are diluted, swallowed up by the skeletons of small makeshift structures that they try to build in a collective rhythm."

Maëlle Dault