On Wednesday, May 1, at 7pm, at Galerie Buchholz (17 E 82nd St, NYC), join Hélène Giannecchini as she discusses Alix Cléo Roubaud, A Portrait in Fragments with the artist Moyra Davey. Alix Cléo Roubaud, A Portrait in Fragments is translated from the French by Thea Petrou, and published by Sylph editions.

When Alix Cléo Roubaud died in 1983 at the age of 31, she left behind a profound and deeply personal body of work exploring self-portraiture, life, illness, the body and death. Hélène Giannecchini was the curator tasked with sorting through some 600 photographs, letters, and other written documents belonging to the artist ahead of a posthumous retrospective held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in 2014. But she had never met Alix Cléo Roubaud and this absence is felt keenly through her writing as she treads the boundaries between biography and fiction, life and art. Hélène Giannecchini pieces together the fragments that remain of this fleeting but dazzling life, spotlighting the theoretical underpinnings of the photographer’s ideas on the double, repetition and drawing out the influences of Wittgenstein and Gertrude Stein on her practice. Just as Alix Cléo Roubaud’s art is approached through the notes jotted in her journal, and the material evidence of trial prints and chemical experiments from the darkroom, so too Hélène Giannecchini respects the interstices in her account, allowing the blind spots of memory to be.

This translation has been occasioned by a new showing of Alix Cléo Roubaud’s work alongside that of Francesca Woodman, Shala Miller, Carla Williams and Justine Kurland in a group exhibition curated by Moyra Davey for Galerie Buchholz, New York.

This event will be in English. It is free.

Hélène Giannecchini was born in 1987. She is a writer and curator who, as the director of the Alix Cléo Roubaud Foundation, co-curated the Alix Cléo Roubaud retrospective held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in 2014. She is the author of Voir de ses propres yeux, éditions du Seuil, La Librairie du XXIe siècle, 2020; and of Alix Cléo Roubaud. Photographies, éditions de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2015. Alix Cléo Roubaud, A Portrait in Fragments was first published in 2014 by Éditions du Seuil as Une image peut-être vraie. Alix Cléo Roubaud. Hélène Giannecchini is a former Villa Albertine resident.

Morey Davey has had solo exhibitions at Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2008); Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2010); Tate Liverpool (2013); Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2014); and Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (2014), among other venues. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions such as Bottle: Contemporary Art and Vernacular Tradition, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2004); Photography on Photography: Reflections on the Medium since 1960, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2008); Atlas: How to carry the world on one’s back?, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2010); Whitney Biennial, New York (2012); and Photo-Poetics: An Anthology, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2015). She currently lives and works in New York.