Marine Hugonnier

Marine Hugonnier was born in 1969 in Paris, France, and lives and works in London. She studied philosophy at the University of Paris-Tolbiac before completing a Master’s degree in anthropology at the University of Nanterre and continuing her artistic studies at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains in Lille. Since the late 1990s, her practice has developed across film, photography, collage, and works on paper, examining the ways in which images shape our understanding of landscapes, territories, histories, and cultures. Her work is particularly attentive to the relationship between geography and representation, questioning the apparently neutral position of the camera and the cultural assumptions embedded in systems of looking. A significant body of Hugonnier’s work explores the relationship between landscape and the history of exploration. Her films frequently begin with a geographical location or a landscape associated with travel, tourism, conflict, or colonial expansion, but instead of simply documenting these places, she draws attention to the processes through which they are constructed as images. *Ariana* (2001), for example, focuses on Afghanistan and on an attempt to film a panoramic view of a mountainous valley to which access is restricted. *The Last Tour* (2004) considers the closure of the cable car leading to the summit of the Matterhorn, while *Travelling Amazonia* (2006) examines the Trans-Amazonian Highway and the history of its construction and its consequences for the region. Across these works, landscape becomes inseparable from political history, mobility, access, and the desire to see and represent distant places. Hugonnier’s approach often deliberately interrupts conventional cinematic expectations. Rather than offering a transparent view of a landscape, her films introduce restrictions, delays, absences, or obstacles that make the act of looking itself visible. The camera can become an instrument whose limitations are as important as what it records, encouraging the viewer to consider the conditions under which an image is produced and the assumptions that accompany it. Her work therefore moves between documentary practice and conceptual investigation, using the cinematic apparatus to question the authority traditionally attributed to photographic and filmic images. The result is a form of visual research in which seeing becomes an active and self-conscious process rather than a neutral act of observation. Another important dimension of her practice is the relationship between images and historical memory. In *Art for Modern Architecture*, Hugonnier works with the front pages of newspapers, introducing geometric forms derived from the work of Ellsworth Kelly into images of political and historical events. The series brings together newspapers from different countries and cultural contexts, placing distinct accounts of the same or related events into dialogue. By covering or interrupting photographic images and sections of the news page, she shifts attention between information and abstraction, asking how collective memory is constructed and how the same event can acquire different meanings according to the cultural and geopolitical context in which it is represented. This investigation of images, memory, and geopolitical narratives has continued throughout Hugonnier’s practice. Her works frequently examine the distance between an event and its representation, between what can be seen and what remains inaccessible, and between a landscape as a physical reality and a landscape as a cultural construction. In this sense, her work is closely connected to questions of visual anthropology, but it avoids treating images as transparent records of reality. Instead, she makes visible the processes of selection, framing, mediation, and interpretation through which images acquire meaning. Hugonnier has exhibited internationally, including at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, and has presented solo exhibitions at institutions such as Villa Romana in Florence, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Konsthall Malmö, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, and the Jeu de Paume in Paris. Her 2022 exhibition *Le cinéma à l’estomac* at the Jeu de Paume, her first major institutional exhibition in France, brought together works spanning her practice since 1998. Her work is held in important institutional collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, and the MACBA in Barcelona. Across film, photography, and collage, Hugonnier continues to investigate the politics of looking and the mechanisms through which images construct knowledge about places and people. Her practice does not simply question what an image represents, but also the conditions that make representation possible: who is allowed to look, from where, through which technological and cultural frameworks, and with what consequences. By exposing these mechanisms, she transforms the act of seeing into a subject in itself, creating works that move between documentary observation, historical research, and a sustained reflection on the power and limits of the image.