The video Burns features a teenager whom Olivier Dollinger met in the city of Rennes. The young man, left alone in the exhibition space at La Criée for several hours, has only a Walkman and a scooter for entertainment. The alternation between moments when he listens to music and those when he starts the scooter to make its wheel skid against the floor or the wall, combined with the scooter’s acceleration and the slow-motion footage, serves to accentuate this sense of confinement.
Alexandra Gillet
“Drawing on specific situations or tensions created between (stereotypical) traits specific to two subcultures—the art world and the bodybuilding world, for example—Olivier Dollinger works in the interstices of differences and oppositions.” We could adopt the statement by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze: “The essential emerges when differences—whether small or large—outweigh the similarities, when two entirely distinct stories unfold simultaneously, and when the characters have an uncertain and ill-defined identity.” Indeed, the artist enjoys uncovering a fragility in individuals that opens up possibilities for existence and transformation within a predetermined space or social group. This is precisely what takes place in his work *Burns*, created at La Criée. Olivier Dollinger’s intention is by no means to demagogically transpose a social situation into an exhibition space. The aim is to capture this teenager’s feelings of confinement and alienation within a neutral, almost clinical space. Feelings of apprehension, isolation, and suffocation predominate in this video. The latent violence of the situation is expressed through the teenager’s movements within the space and the damage he causes to the floor with the scooter.”
Larys Frogier, exhibition brochure for Ex-change, Rennes, La Criée Center for Contemporary Art, 2000
