Katya Ev
(ekaterina vasilyeva)

A parade of alternative dandies.When they returned to the crowd, the participants were not completely incognito. The blue light in their hands revealed singularly made-up faces, sequined costumes and offbeat hairstyles and hats reminiscent of the rave parties that rock the squats of the nearby suburbs every weekend. Katya deliberately invited figures from Paris's alternative culture for her first performance at the Palais de Tokyo, the capital of contemporary art. It was not so much this paradox that interested the artist in her choice of performers. To embody her work, she wanted above all to express the strong identities of her protagonists. Among the performers were personalities who have become key figures in the undergound scene, such as Oksana Shachko, founding member of the Femen movement and recently featured on the cover of the trendy Crash Magazine, Nunez, percussionist with the group La Femme, and Eliott Banon, founding member of the Parallèle collective and La Capela. Ev wanted everyone on the journey to focus on expressing their inner states rather than on the space to be reached. The result was a slow, poetic arrhythmia, an aesthetic composition disrupted by the presence of a disturbing object: a police flashing light. 

A properly political disturbance. A reworking of his performance Augenmusik (2016, projected above the rotating police lights), which revealed the contradictions of the State of Emergency, To hear with eyes does not completely lose its political dimension as it passes through the doors of the Palais de Tokyo. Without seeking to provoke, Ekaterina Vasilyeva's approach tends to reflect on the structures of power by pointing out their paradoxes, which are not obvious at first glance. For example, the possibility of buying a flashing beacon legally, even though it is an attribute of the forces of law and order. In this case, the person giving the orders is the artist, who is distributing fragments of state power to her agents, shattering the regal symbolism of the flashing beacon. This gesture, which could be described as anarchist, challenges the viewer as much as the object itself: the hypnotic persistence of the rotating light becomes alarming. We hear with our eyes, as the title of the performance indicates. But this two-toned sound is itself the bearer of ambiguity; it worries as much as it reassures. For the three days of the festival, the flashing lights remain lit as they have been arranged in a circle by the performers. In the Palais de Tokyo's most raw and dusty space, the artist combines an element of police prerogative with an architectural aspect that could be that of an illegally squatted wasteland. In this area, which is normally closed to the public, there is no longer any need for guards: the flashing lights watch over it as much as they protect it. Through her constant and subtle ambivalence, Katya Ev has made her contribution to the annual disturbance encouraged by Do Disturb, and can only be encouraged to remain a disruptive element." Claire Contamine, 2018, full version here