Travel is a typically contemporary way of living. It has also the oldest root in human history – it’s through travel – displacement, migration and nomad life, and even exile – that human beings have written its history and formed its identity – humanity.
Life is a continuous travel, between the original location and final destination, between the past and the future, between memory and reality, between emotion and imagination… Robert Cahen’s work is one of the most interesting incarnations of such a process – it’s also truly contemporary, not only it resorts to the most up-to-date techniques (electronic ways of producing images and sounds), but also explores and demonstrates the very essential aspects of our life today – permanent oscillation, or passage – in the artist’s own word, between stability, settlement, locality and change, displacement, globality… and the very state of being generated in the negotiation.
Voyager / Rencontrer, solo exhibition of Robert Cahen presents the artist’s video creations since 1980s. Most of the works are results of his travel experience to various parts of the world. They bring viewer into a veritable floating world navigating between reality and fiction, a quasi bodily experience of travel itself.