Adieu Les Demoiselles

Adieu Les Demoiselles is a collection of exquisite montage-like images that experiment with layering and mirroring, culled from Theo Eshetu´s video installation of the same name, created for the exhibition The Sorcerer's Burden: Contemporary Art and the Anthropological Turn held at The Contemporary Austin. With an introduction by Heather Pesanti, the exhibition curator, and a critical text by acclaimed Italian curator Matteo Lucchetti, this publication offers a rich tapestry of images which translate into book form the experience of watching the video.

The appropriation of Les Demoiselles D'avignon (1907), Picasso's iconic cornerstone of Western modernism, serves as a point of departure for a critical repositioning of his practice as a social and historical process. Images from African and modernist sources that influenced the original creation of the painting are projected onto live performers who re-enact the narratives that led to the creation of the work but are also transformed and dissolved into new narratives. As the title suggests, we bid “Adieu” to "Les Demoiselles" as characters from the brothels of Avignon and instead encounter performers for whom sexuality is more nuanced and empowered.

Throughout his prolific oeuvre, spanning over 30 years, Theo Eshetu has addressed themes taken from anthropology and art history, creating a distinctive body of works based on a syncopated rhythmic montage of sounds and images. These properties are echoed in the sequences of this publication adding a new twist in which repetitive images act as signals of motion regaining their status as iconic representations. The video, which deconstructs and subverts Picasso's original Les Demoiselles d'Avignon through “filmic” and performative reinterpretation, finds in this publication a return to the static nature of painting. The frozen gestures and actions are fragmented in close-ups placing the figures into ever-shifting landscapes.