Home is our first universe, a cosmos in which our imagination can forge both comforting fantasies and new ramparts when these fall, rebuilding foundations and bridges to enable us never to cease growing inwardly. Heaven and Hell is a collection of fragments from all the houses that have provided us shelter, as well as those we have envisioned inhabiting. Their broken walls reveal the stories of transformed realities. Objects within this space are akin to body parts that carry memories.

Self-construction involves following role models, giving us the strength to grow. Identity is never definitive: it's a process that's always in equilibrium between temporary, fluctuating situations.

Each photographed character was inspired by a real or fictional heroine. From pop culture to sport to myth, and actresses from the big and small screens, these heroines have sustained and helped us to invent ourselves. Pedestal figures, each of which supports her own allegory by coexisting with an object of symbolic value, whose nature puts physical and emotional heft into conversation. A bouquet of flowers may now carry more weight than a mountain of stacked furniture.

Through their photographic, performative and introspective gestures, Nhu Xuan Hua and Vimala Pons have foregrounded the link between body-action / woman-body, the idea of proposing oneself as subject and not as object. The artists offer a hybrid exhibition in which lived experience has taken over the space, as if to find a new shelter in which to pursue its construction. Multiple simultaneous levels of narration induce a poetic vertigo in perpetual motion: whether outside or inside oneself, imbalance represents the contamination of image by reality.

Nhu Xuan Hua and Vimala Pons