Bertille
Bak

With videos where fiction and reality merge, Bertille Bak stares at the social groups as well as the rituals and material cultures they generate. Her point of view refuses to be neutral. Her work aims at reproducing the subjectivity of a community which plays its own role and in which the artist can integrate over a long period of time in order to establish intimate relationships. Her singular approach therefore oscillates between documentary, investigation and ethnographic research.

Seeking to capture community and identity issues, Bertille Bak questions the memory of individuals and places, whether it be in the mining basin of northern France where she comes from, in Bangkok, in Vietnam or in gypsy communities. With subtlety and humor, her work reveals the complexity of a certain social reality.

The video works of Bertille Bak kept in the Pinault Collection were shown for the first time in 2012 during the exhibition "Parole des Images" (Speech of the Images), at Palazzo Grassi in Venice.