Alloy is part of Crossing the Line: FIAF Fall Festival 2008: Initiated, conceived and produced by FIAF and in partnership with leading New York cultural institutions, the second edition of this inter-disciplinary contemporary arts festival, focuses on artists who are transforming cultural practices on both sides of the Atlantic.

Virginie Yassef’s installations of videos, photographs, and sculptures reveal the poetry of everyday life, emphasizing the subtle gap between perception and reality. In her universe, the strangeness, sometimes even supernatural, always surface where least expected.

In creating Alloy (2007), the title video of the installation, Yassef assembled an array of talents from France to offer a unique perspective on collaboration comprised of a video-montage including music, text, sculpture, photography, and a child’s interaction with one of Yassef’s moveable relief-sculptures. The installation will feature a sculptural piece based on the video and made specifically for this exhibit.

Also included are the videos:

• Fantomes.Parachutes.Dragons.Projectiles (2004) filmed in Beijing, China. Eschewing the exotic, Virginie Yassef, draws inspiration from her surroundings to transform moments from life, involving play, ritual, and work into poetic micro-narratives.

• Dragonfly.Canyon.Spiders.Cling.10 Mille Fourmis (Dragonfly.Canyon.Spiders.Cling.10 Thousand Ants) (2004), a study in scale, from the micro to the macro, where misappropriated commonplace objects play with an effect of distortion that heightens the density of reality, without ever dramatizing it.

• Et le mur lui obéit (And the Wall Obeyed Him) (2004) which is based on the strange phenomenon based on international film pioneer Maurice Tourneur’s concept: The less shown; the more seen.

• WOW (2005) is an assemblage of diverse activities “surprised by the camera” to form a set of heterogeneous moments composing a ghostly scenario populated by heroes in training for strange, unusual battles.

Virginie Yassef, born in 1970, holds a graduate degree in visual arts from both the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts de Paris (ENSBA, the French National School of Fine Arts) and Sorbonne University. She just completed a post-graduate degree at La Seine, which is a research program at ENSBA, and won a residency scholarship from the Vienna-based Quartier Museum in Austria.

Virginie Yassef currently has an exhibit at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de paume in Paris through September 28. Yassef is represented by the Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois Gallery in Paris, where she recently had a one-woman exhibition. Her work has been shown at the Corentin Hamel Gallery in Paris, the Center for Contemporary Art in Bretigny-sur-Orge, the Kunsthalle in Baden Baden, and the Modern Art Museum in Paris, among others.

Alloy is presented in partnership with Galerie Georges-Philippe and Nathalie Vallois.