Vimala Pons

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We had left the artist on stage, in a striking performance: balancing a car on her head, her face concealed behind a hyper realistic mask of Angela Merkel, Vimala Pons was engaged in a strip tease – slowed down by many layers of clothes – while delivering a long monologue, the memory of an unhappy love affair of the former chancellor.

This staggering scene, much applauded, shared and commented has remained as one of the most outstanding memories of the theatrical year.

But the astonishment left aside, the technical and acrobatic performance was not what we remembered, no more than the surprising talent of the artist as an imitator, nor her absurd humor, which sent the audience into a burst of laughter.

What remained and was far beyond the spectacular scope of the event, was the existential abyss opening up in front of us: this enigmatic and ludicrous chimera who strip teased on the stage in a chaotic and unsteady urgency, was sharing with us a deep and metaphysical solitude: that of the learning of desire, the gaze of others, and the absence of a response to this desire. The exhibition of the artist’s body and skills actually disguised a personal journey deep into the expression of inner distress.

The dramatic path and the theatrical device displayed to lead to this emotion remain one of the most unexpected and singular trajectories ever seen on stage. This exposure, through its radicalism and singularity, extended other ones, just as mysterious and enigmatic, which have punctuated art history: from Pina Bausch to Marina Abramovic, through Francisco Goya and Marcel Duchamp.

Today, the artist’s imaginative world goes on unfolding through a language other than that of stage performance: Vimala Pons presents, at Galerie Anne Barrault, a series of very short videos, hung on the walls like as many paintings in the exhibition space. Each of these video shots comes from image bank catalogs, the contents of which are produced on an almost industrial scale and are made up of very colorful, moving images filmed in short focal length initially for commercial use – mainly advertising.

This imagery of repetitive stereotypes (about heterosexual couple, the corporate world or the family unit…) are initially produced in order to arise the desire to buy or consume, by integrating promotional editing for goods or an ideology.

Through text, music and editing, the artist reexamines these images of the consumerist happiness of the Californian middle class and offers a gritty, hallucinatory reading. In her ownway, she haunts the artificiality of situations, putting back everything that the production process has evacuated: irrationality, desire, doubt, neurosis and trauma.

Here, the vacuity of the promotional staging becomes the background of a fragile, longing and delirious mankind, in which the narrator’ story, in a maelstrom of inner voices, makes consuming, cruelty, entertainment, joy, narcissism and death drive collide. Somewhere between Lettrist 2.0 cinema and theater of the absurd, Vimala Pons, for a while, quits performance to become a video artist and enter the images as she enters her characters: by breaking in.

Clément Gogitore

Vimala Pons, the shock

There is no great art without risk-taking. What most artists symbolically risk when composing their works, (but this symbolic act is real from a psychic point of view), Vimala Pons risks it twice, since she risks it clearly on stage (but this real act is totally unreal from a psychic point of view). This is perhaps due to the Indian metaphysics strange fairies she grew up with.  To know that experience is also Maya, illusion, may have given Vimala Pons this detachment, which allows her to do nearly anything she wants with her body, without fear or shaking. Unlike the title of Chloé Delaume’s novel, she is a woman with someone inside, except that it is someone else. Vimala is a person inside her own person.  She is a person whose person is a machine she can manage, a little as if she was driving a car.

Then, the shock was Le perimeter de Denver, in 2021. Vimala Pons was on her own, but going through so many physical transformations that you had the feeling of watching a whole company perform: the Vimala Pons Septet. Characters changes by stripping, accents changes, uninterrupted monologues: the necessary concentration required to perform both these feats of balance and this virtuoso acting turns the vehicle Vimala Pons controls into a kind of supersonic autopilot one. Vimala Pons is Arjuna, the warrior with Krishna as his coachman, who takes him to the great sacred war against forms – against conditioning and determining.

As to the story, it is a murder mystery but also a transversal, dense and complex reading of contemporary psychology concerning lies. It is, once more, the comic and poetic power of literality: the title refers to the space offered by small lies, which creates the “ first avatar of self”, starting to live beside us. But then, the show explores every possibility of this space. The story is set in Brighton, in 2008, in a thalassotherapy hotel. Someone is killed. The victim is a “digital contributor “, that is to say, a troll. He or she is therefore a person who has used his or her false identity and his or her forging of lies, to the point where it could be said that he or she did not exist any more as an individual before he or her murder. He or she is a dead person who was already dead, but not in the sense of moksha, the Hinduism or Buddhism liberation. The troll has certainly no longer a personality, but it has not overcome its ego to reach infinite, omnipresent, incorporeal, transcendent and immanent reality, on the contrary. The troll ha no longer a personality, in the sense that nothing else than the ego can exist within it: no infinite reality, no transcendence or immanence, nothing. If in Indian metaphysics, Self is distinguished from Ego, like Krishna is distinguished from Arjuna, or consciousness is distinguished from the mind, in cybernetic space we are dealing only with Egos, with no access to self. They are beings freed by nothing, given up to the darkest passions. Kali Yuga already exists, but parallel to us, in computers. Those who live in computers, spending their time on social networks, writing and replying to comments, fighting by fake news, malicious gossip and mockery, do live the end of the world.

Is it again India that has enabled Vimala Pons to understand so well how the notion of avatar used in cybernetic language (the transposition of an individual into a digital identity) is different, indeed antagonistic, from the original one in Indian metaphysics (the divinity taking a corporeal form)? And how this non-identity of the cybernetic creature is opposed to the access, through the negation of forms or the awareness of their limitations, to an impersonal awareness leading up to an infinite plenitude? The troll, with no physical life, its motionless body reduced to a hand typing on a keyboard, holding a mouse or moving on a track pad, believes in its omnipotence, whereas it does only exist in a negative way, by depriving others of their power. On the opposite, Vilama Pons ‘extremely difficult balancing exercises, switching from a body to another, from an identity to another, enable her to reach and go beyond forms. Her inclination to take risks elevates her to the artist’s humbleness practicing, every evening in front of her audience, a game with her own death; hence the essential characteristic of her art. The more human beings will get lost in the dark labyrinths of their psyche, the more they will need artists, who will blow up this labyrinth and show them that illusion exists even more in life itself. The more the media and Internet world will consume human mind, the more mankind will need live shows to be reminded that life exists only in the true experiment of risk and the physical confrontation with what is impossible.

Pacôme Thiellement