Return of the Broken Screens consists of a series of video compositions for damaged screens, found, bought, or used. The dam- age and alterations due to bad handling of a former owner are the only means to differentiate these mass-produced objects that are themselves designed to display all types of images. Each composition is created for a specific screen. Adapting and playing with the particularities of each, blurs the boundary between real and virtual space. This is similar to the Japanese art of Kintsugi, where broken pottery is repaired with a mix of lacquer and powdered gold. The screens find a second life. The hole in the glass of an iPhone, the deliquescent pixels of a plasma screen, the star shaped cracks of a tablet : all of these accidents become the origin and are involved in the video, trying to play with each particularity.

With the support of SCAM.
Family Servais Collection.

Émilie Brout & Maxime Marion began their collaboration when they joined the ENSAD Lab in Paris, for two years. Their work has been the recipient of the Arte Laguna Prize and the Contemporary Talent Prize of the Schneider foundation.

“Since 2009 the French couple has been focusing on projects that, renovate the modernist language of film, making an extensive use of appropriated content from the web, which is freed from its status of meaningless, apparently valueless data that is floating in the information networks. It is rearranged in complex, algorithmically generated, sometimes interactive narratives, or into powerful, iconic images.” — Domenico Quaranta