GUEST OF HONOUR
Vertigo, the exhibition by Kourtney Roy, offers a unique, cross-disciplinary presentation featuring several successive series created over more than a decade. It invites us to navigate between reality and fiction while highlighting the complexity of human emotions. Using her own image as a starting point, Kourtney Roy stages bold compositions that play with the visual codes of pop culture and cinema. The photographs are at once intimate portraits and visual narratives that question notions of beauty, vulnerability, and self-representation. Vertigo shifts between hypnotic and unsettling atmospheres—like a daring vertigo in the face of illusion and reality. Visitors are encouraged to reflect on their relationship to image and identity, to consider the many facets of their existence, and to explore how we construct ourselves through the gaze of others. Vertigo is an invitation to delve into the depths of the human soul.
Last Paradise
Last Paradise is an innovative multimedia work created by photographer and filmmaker Kourtney Roy and composer Mathias Delplanque, winners of the 6th edition of the Swiss Life Prize à 4 mains. This project merges photography and music to tell the fictional journey of an eccentric woman through an abandoned seaside landscape, inspired by the Adriatic coast near Rimini, Italy. Roy’s images, marked by saturated colors and striking contrasts, capture the melancholic beauty of these off-season locales, while Delplanque’s soundtrack—composed with local vintage synthesizers—evokes a dreamy, offbeat atmosphere. Together, they explore themes such as solitude, the passage of time, and nostalgia for a lost world.
Enter as Fiction
Enter as Fiction is a photographic series in which Kourtney Roy stages herself in cinematic self-portraits. Through meticulously composed scenes set in mundane locations—such as motels or swimming pools—she creates images reminiscent of 1950s films. Her work explores the boundary between the real and the fantastic, transforming the everyday into something strange and unexpected.
In Between
In Between explores transitional spaces and in-between places, capturing moments suspended between reality and fiction. Her hyperreal, cinematic self-portraits immerse viewers in a sensory narrative where melancholy meets mystery. Kourtney Roy examines the banality of the everyday by transforming it into scenes that are both intriguing and poetic.
Sorry, No Vacancy
Sorry, No Vacancy focuses on marginal and transitory locations in southwestern Texas: isolated roads, abandoned tourist stops, and solitary towns. Kourtney Roy draws on American iconography, mythology, and folklore. The daily reality is transformed into a parallel universe where imagination overlays the peripheral world, offering a vision of rural America that is both strange and familiar.
