Spanning drawing, video, sound, and dance, French artist Paul Maheke’s practice embodies the interplay between the self and the collective in the complex shaping of our identities. His work brings personal narratives into the public forum, challenging us to confront the vulnerable presence of another. Employing contrasting aesthetic strategies of hypervisibility and erasure, Maheke produces environments suspended in productive crises of coherence, where the destabilization of fixed relations gives rise to the open-endedness of his subject.
In spite of my own desire to see you disappear is a sound installation that attempts to render the experience of being affected, recognized, and understood. While Maheke’s work in dance often includes his physical presence, here the visual representation of his body is conspicuously absent. He instead uses the temporal, experiential, and emotive qualities of sound to uncover the sensation of the body and guide the audience’s movement.
For this commission, Maheke shared a journal from 2021 with musician Ndobo-emma to sonically and lyrically interpret. Their resulting collaboration is one of spoken word and musicality, where fragmented ruminations are recited in English and French against ambient dissonance. As voices process dreams, flashbacks, insights, and reflections, a hesitant and melancholy narrative takes form. Memories intensify and the notes crescendo into sweeping chords and a soulful song, before resolving into a chamber piece. The work’s ethereal soundscape is scored in collaboration with Ndobo-emma, with additional support from producer Smogy and sound engineer Romain Bernat.
Teetering between the confessional and the restrained, In spite of my own desire to see you disappear grapples with feelings of dependency and hope and ideas about personhood. At Mercer Union, the sound work is situated in a series of provisional structures—a narrow corridor, a soft platform, and a set of benches—that invite moments of respite, gestation, and interconnection. The submerged vocals in the sound work are materialized in several wall drawings depicting hybrids of mythical creatures and abstract figuration, alluding to less visible forces at play within the field of relations. The surrounding built environment acts as a representation of an interiority in the state of becoming, as well as a conduit that transmits one’s experience to someone else. For Maheke, such sites of encounter offer the audience different forms of legibility for the work, asking what types of resonance can be shared from knowing only partially.
Paul Maheke: In spite of my own desire to see you disappear is the eighth project developed through Mercer Union’s Artist First commissioning platform, and Maheke's first institutional solo exhibition in North America.
