Kim Boske (Netherlands, 1978) remembers that as a child, fascinated by trees, she dreamed of being able to apprehend them in their entire majesty, with a single glance.

Since she did not have the tool to allow her to do this, she quickly went around them to try to print in her mind the most complete image she could form, the one that would most accurately reproduce the experience she had had. As an artist, she deliberately chose photography to try to make this child’s game more concrete and to make an image of the tree’s noisy and living reality. From the outset, she undertook not to record a single moment in time, as photography knows how to do, but to retain in a single image a multitude of shots, a succession of viewpoints. Their superimposition then unfolds the long time of the discovery of a landscape and of the artist’s journey within it.

Often understood as the reproduction of the appearance of reality, the philosophical notion of mimèsis is understood here as the dynamic, the active relationship with a living reality. The exhibition presented in the Jardin des Plantes retraces, in a selection of key works from her various series, the career of an artist who has never ceased to challenge the representation of this relationship. It is indeed what is whispered on the surface of the image, the story of the experience of looking at the natural thing she has chosen to explore – the forest at the end of the world, the neighbour’s garden, the wild waterfall or the wise bouquet. In this journey through time, she takes us to Japan, her most recent field of experimentation, where she extends the experience by immersing her time-images in indigo baths, inviting us to literally look beyond their surface.

The exhibition is supported by the Kingdom of the Netherlands.