THE YOGA SERIES

AFTER JOHN BALDESSARI

2012

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5 pigment prints on canvas

175 x 146 cm

This work is inspired by The Goya Series by John Baldessari, a series of text/image montages in which the American artist associated banal images with titles appropriated from Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War.

It has always seemed peculiar to me that many photographers refer to yoga, Zen Buddhism and other Far Eastern philosophies, even though they appeared several centuries before the invention of photography. In this series, I have therefore linked aphorisms from the Yoga Sutra of Patañjali, a text in Sanskrit which would have been written around 200 years BC, and which remains relevant today for all those who practice yoga, with photographs from an old photography manual from the 1950s. The photographs illustrate photography development and printing techniques and are even stranger because they are removed from their context and made more remote by enlargements which reveal the printing texture and the paper’s fibre.

The Disasters of War hence give way to the philosophical teaching of yoga, which takes on another dimension once it is related to photography.