DIRTY HANDS

NICOLAS DAUBANES

For nearly 10 years, Nicolas Daubanes has been working on the world of prisons through drawings, installations, and videos that stem from immersive residencies in penitentiaries. From his iron dust drawings to monumental concrete installations tainted with sugar, Nicolas Daubanes is interested in the simultaneous occurrence of hanging and falling. It is a matter of perceiving the energy of life before before ruination.

By using the title of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Les Mains sales (‘Dirty Hands’) written after the Second World War, Nicolas Daubanes indicates a double paradox: the political commitment of artists or intellectuals, and the difficulty of the latter to position themselves as such, as long as an " intellectual cannot be a true revolutionary ".