Ordinary Kingdom by Zoé Metra

Zoé Metra, winner of the 2022 Juvernars Prize, returns to IESA for her exhibition Ordinary Kingdom from 11/21 to 12/9 in the IESA gallery.

My name is Zoe Metra; I graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Lyon in 2021.

I live and work between Paris and Athens.
In 2022 I won the Juvenars-IESA Prize, and since then I have exhibited as part of the Résonance program of the Lyon Biennale 2022.

For the 2022 Juvenars-IESA prize, I presented a video installation titled NO SLEEP FOR DREAMRZ. We face a screen-window in which one’s reflection overlaps with the projected image.

The video shows a young girl addressing us in a long monologue in which she questions a certain reality between what she sees on social media and what she experiences in everyday life.

In the form of a confessional, she shares her doubts, typical of a generation raised on images, overwhelmed by those same images that leave a feeling of powerlessness in the face of standards that are hard to reach.

Through media such as video, installation, photography, and sculpture, my work draws up a set of portraits questioning a certain reality through reinvented mythologies. The diversion is not an inverted or carnivalesque staging but a presentation of representations: revealing the flaw in images and pointing out the gap between the idealized cliché and the real. The recorded portraits highlight characters who evolve in worlds apart.

"Freaks" who tell themselves stories in reaction to a normative world in which they don’t tick all the boxes.
My installations tend toward the creation of alternative, sensitive worlds in which environments, small ecosystems made of objects/tools and images, evolve, recreate themselves, and fade away to protect the one who fantasizes and to make up for a sometimes brutal reality.

I draw a lot of inspiration from those close to me, from what I see on the internet and on television, from teenage and intimate imagery…

I am returning to IESA to present Ordinary Kingdom, an exhibition composed of an immersive video installation and other pieces.

It will revolve around the video, a fake TV series called INTENSA, whose episodes feature loved ones who identify as female. These people become heroines of the series, casting a new eye on their daily lives and on the perception we have of others. The viewer finds themselves facing familiar figures in whom they can recognize themselves.

Zoé Metra