Faced with my mother’s cancer three years ago, I started to explore the connection between body and mind in the forming of identity. As far as I remember I’ve always felt trapped in my body, having difficulties dealing with the glance of others. I started to take pictures, instinctively. As I was looking at the pictures I began drawing, I wanted to look inside, bring the inside out. At the same time, in a seemingly contradictory movement, I added layers, “covering” my body, protecting it. A protection I never felt as a child.

With this residence I would like to go further, challenge this need to add layers, to « cover » the body and understand better the relationship between the body and the soul. I believe this residence would be a great opportunity to exchange with others and benefits from the discussions and resources this residence has been gathering over the years to explore further the various representations of the body. I would also love to collaborate with artists dealing with different medium, as it would be a great opportunity to expand my practice. Having lived « outside my body » for a long time now, I am particularly interested to explore ways to visually represent this disconnection, and maybe reconnection, to the body.

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Karine Baptiste (aka Louise Prévert) is a French visual artist. She graduated from the International Center of Photography in 2013, where she received the Director’s Fellowship. Her self-published book Fragments was exhibited at the 2013 Unfolding Images photo book exhibition, and was short-listed for the 2015 Athens Photo Festival. In 2014, Louise participated to the New York Foundation for the Arts Immigrant Artists Mentoring Program. In 2013 she co-founded the 643 Collective which City Project is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Archives, &Rare Book Library at Emory University. She has been a teaching assistant at ICP from 2013 to 2015.