LES APPARENCES – GABY SAHHAR, 2026
In the work Les Apparences, Lucien Giorgis confront us with the immense, porous nature between the image and the self. This relationship is one that is constantly being negotiated in Giorgis’s practice. Through the meeting of mediums, we are presented with a form that resembles the feeling of a photobooth, a recognisable object, familiar yet simultaneously alien in many ways, reclaimed through the process of conceptualisation. Giorgis extracts and subverts this empty, negative, mundane, somewhat institutional space. Inside the pitch-black booth plays the video La bonne éducation, translated as Good Manners in English, where we should see ourselves before pressing “snap.” Filmed in a large, empty theatre, the notion of logic collapses as time and spatial awareness fuse, resulting in sanitised aesthetics dominated by neo-noir conditions, with the artist being the only vulnerable figure visible in this prism. We are reminded of the work of French surrealist photographer and self-portraitist Claude Cahun. The importance of enquiry into the self, outside of social norms, is the space that we are being offered and confronted with.
Through Giorgis’s precise, intimate, digital photographic process, the camera lens becomes a system for revealing the leakages that occur when images enter high-circulation circuits, resulting in the loss of our personal digital narratives, as explored in The Wretched of the Screen ¹ by Hito Steyerl. This universal feeling is captured in a series of photographs stapled to the outside of the photobooth, highlighting the hidden, chosen, or reflected imperfections that occur in selfies, self-portraits, or photobooth culture. This pushback against dominant forms of representation aligns with writer Jack Halberstam’s idea that “failure allows for escaping the punishing norms of capitalist success and heteronormative lifestyles.” ² The wooden photobooth reinforces the physical and psychological space that self-censorship reproduces within us, quickly becoming a place of solitude. The perverse nature of the boundaries we are assigned, or assign ourselves, is central to the photobooth’s function, reinforcing the queer dynamics of how objects, processes, and experiences emerge from our sense of self. This notion of radical liberation is echoed by influential English photographer Jo Spence in the 1970s, who offered an alternative to self-image, psychodiagnosis, and early therapeutic approaches, using photography as an emerging, accessible healing tool. Giorgis’s work draws on gender-focused histories, reconfiguring them within an expanded photobooth that unsettles the ways images are collectively produced, performed, and interpreted.
¹ Steyerl Hito, The Wretched of the Screen, Berlin, Sternberg Press, 2012
² Halberstam Jack, The Queer Art of Failure, Durham, Duke University Press, 2011, p. 3