Rebekka Deubner’s work is permeated by narratives of metamorphosis, closely tied to the earth and the bodies it sustains. From Fukushima Prefecture, where she made her first visit in 2014 and would return several times, she brings back suggestive images: faces captured during chance encounters, seaweed, and other living organisms encountered while wandering along the edge of the exclusion zone. Scattered in fragments by the disaster, they are permeated by this same palpable quivering, exuding signs of a persistent vitality. The substance of these bodies, the fluids emanating from them and exchanged, framed up close, lies at the heart of the series titled On the Surface, the Skin, created within the intimacy of the artist’s love life. The act of photographing thus captures desire, countering its volatility, warding off its loss. From this intimate exploration of the body and its profound movements, she turns to the body as a political territory with “Les saisons thermiques”, a series dedicated to male contraception. Here we find that same approach—like an intaglio print—of slowly drawing near to the body and rendering its tender plasticity. In these bodies standing close to her, an alternative representation of masculinity is embodied. She zooms in even closer with “Strip”, a work in progress composed of photograms and videos in which the artist attempts to become one with her deceased mother. She dons her clothes and undergarments—like counterforms that still carry within them the latent trace of the body and skin that once inhabited them—slips into them, and, during video performances, ties them, patches them, and covers herself with them. Alongside these short films, Rebekka Deubner presents a collection of photograms of clothing that are also fragmented; when reassembled on the wall, they trace the contours of a vast, warm body.
Rebekka Deubner (b. 1989), based in the Paris region, graduated in 2013 from the École de l’image Les Gobelins in Paris. She combines her personal work with press and commercial photography and teaches photography at the ENSBA in Lyon.
