Mem
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Photographic, video and multimedia device

Sizes and process:
Set of 22 silver color photographs in medium format (120 film size).

H 32 X L 32 inches and H 16 X L 16 inches, Diptychs H 32 X L 65 inches, Giclée process on Hahnemühle PhotoRag 308g Fine Art paper mounted on museum aluminum Dibond, fitted with an aluminium chassis.

Limited edition of 5.

Price H 32 X L 32 inches: € 3,200 incl. More information.

Price H 32 X L 65 inches (diptych): € 4,600 incl. More information.

Price H 16 X L 16 inches: € 1,250 incl. More information.

Video La Bouchée (The mouthful), duration 3'20''
Video Encore des Bisous (Still Kisses), duration 1’05’’ 

Children's Book Côme et la Dame, 2010 (Unpublished). 
Novel Une planète au fond de l'oeil, 2010 (Unpublished).

Mem has several meanings. Mem means in French "read-only memory (ROM)", as opposed to the "random access memory (RAM)" of the computer, while in science, Mem (Maternal-Embryonic) is the name of a medical experiment on genetics and fertility. In Hebrew, Mem or the letter M symbolizes the interior, water, mater and mother.

Mireille Loup talks about women as mothers, their relationship to procreation. Ode, suffering, birth, exaltation.

A majestic woman (1) and a boy of two years old evolve within the rules of the golden section, inside sets of great pictoriality. A tied woman as a storm approaches, an Odalisque lying on the lands of a diptych, a fall or a biblical flight amid clouds. One remembers, seeing these iconographic images, The Tempest by Giorgione, or Et in Arcadia Ego by Poussin.

But Mireille Loup remakes and undoes history. She bounces off the references and fractures them. A blood stain, covered by hundreds of ladybugs, is flooding the draped robe; blue on the image shatters the harmony of the composition. Among these photographic stagings, white still-lives, barely legible as they are so clear, break the unity of the work. One of them is entitled Angels’ square (2), another entitled What the water has wrested from me makes reference to the painting by Frida Khalo, Lo que el agua me ha dado.

In the manner of art books, the scenography shows photos of large sizes sometimes accompanied by a close-up, a detail of the work enlarged. In a separate room, two videos are released in a loop. “Aesthetically, the videos make reference to the images, so white they remind one of shrouds, which accompany them. They evoke two requirements necessary for a child to blossom. These have been the focus of considerable medical and sociological research, especially among premature births and orphans: the need for food; and the need for love. (3)”

This veiled woman, draped in traditional postures becomes a contemporary Mater Dolorosa. Mireille Loup talks about this journey of birth, with rage and poetry, a journey to be seen, heard, but also read in her children book "Come and the Lady" and in her novel "The Little Baron."

Mem benefits from the support of Galerie Magda Danysz (Paris), Brandt Gallery (Amsterdam), Les Photographiques (Le Mans, Fr), Malraux Museum (Le Havre, Fr), Voies Off (Arles, Fr) La Passerelle (Gap, Fr), Museo da Imagem (Braga).

1 – One will recognize the installation “A thirty years old woman” by Mireille Loup, 2001.

2 – Location of a cemetery where one is allowed to bury children who died before being reported to the registrar.

3 – Alexia Guggemos, in Déliredelart, May 2010.