Noémie Goudal: And yet it still moves
Opening reception | Thursday 9 October, 6 – 8pm
What fascinates me is the ability to see a landscape not as something fixed, but as a living, moving entity – constantly shifting, evolving, becoming. Even what seems stable is in quiet motion, reminding us that place, like time, is always in flux. – Noémie Goudal
Edel Assanti is pleased to present And yet it still moves – Noémie Goudal’s fifth solo exhibition at the gallery. Premiered at the Centre Pompidou in 2024 as part of her Marcel Duchamp Prize presentation, Goudal’s photographic work Rocks and her latest film Grand Vide (both 2024) are featured alongside a new photographic triptych, housed within a site-specific installation created specially for the show.
Encompassing film, sculpture, photography and performance, Goudal’s practice is underpinned by rigorous research at the intersection of ecology and Earth sciences. Her practice revolves around the construction of intricate, illusionistic interventions in the landscape. Spanning three rooms, the exhibition continues her artistic dialogue with the field of paleoclimatology, examining the vastness of geological time and the inherent instability of our planet’s surface. Measured in millions of years, the notion of “deep time” reveals geographies of landscapes as transient moments in a cycle of continuous flux.
The exhibition opens with Rocks, a moving image work that uses optical illusion as a visual metaphor for our misleading perception of permanence in nature. A pinned photograph depicts a stratified rocky landscape, overlaid with a looped, torch-lit video projection. The projector’s beam appears to cut through the still image, disrupting the photograph’s material surface. This interplay between moving light and static surface evokes the immense geological timescales embedded in rock formations, drawing attention to the imperceptible processes – tectonic pressure, sedimentation, and erosion – that shape the Earth. Against this backdrop, Goudal invokes the cataclysmic impact of the Chicxulub meteorite, which struck Earth 66 million years ago. The collision expelled billions of tons of black carbon, sulfur and silica into the atmosphere, triggering a prolonged nuclear winter that halted photosynthesis for two years and extinguished three-quarters of animal species. Through this tension, Rocks is a meditation on the slow violence of tectonic change, contravening the human impulse to categorise and freeze what is, by nature, always shifting.
In the central gallery, three new photographs serve as a connective thread, drawing together the adjacent rooms and unifying the works across the exhibition. These works document stage environments that Goudal has created, simulating an opaque window onto a historic vegetal ecosystem that will never be fully visualisable. This arrangement invites viewers to navigate the shifting temporal and spatial dimensions of the landscape, suggesting a continuum rather than a fixed perspective.
The final room presents Goudal’s 2024 film Grand Vide, commissioned as part of the artist’s Prix Marcel Duchamp presentation. The film depicts a dark, cavernous rock formation that progressively explodes in hypnotic slow motion, exposing piercing shafts of light from within. Goudal delves into the geological and conceptual magnitude of the Great Rift, examining the Tanzanian segment – one of the most visibly expressive sites of the Earth’s continuous deformation. Through a sequence of collapsing staged photographic sets choreographed with theatrical precision and underscored by a visceral soundtrack, the artist simulates the invisible forces of tectonic movement and erosion. The instability of the photographic imagery mirrors the temporality of natural form. Through the use of architectural structures and fabricated landscapes, Goudal blurs the boundaries between the real and the constructed, offering a meditation on the uncertainty that underpins our perceptions of the natural world.
Image: Noémie Goudal, Grand Vide, 2024. Single channel HD video, 08:47 min. © Noémie Goudal. Courtesy the artist and Edel Assanti.
