ANTOINE DOCHNIAK

It is said that with synthetic pheromones it may be possible to send false alarms and misleading signals to bees that usually secrete and detect these chemical messages in order to regulate their behaviour across a spectrum extending from alarm to attack, by way of mating. With such manipulations, we would observe a detour of the micro-society that constitutes the beehive, a possible allegory of our own political systems. Drawing from the influences of so-called “social” beings – which include insects, birds and humans – Antoine Dochniak's sculptural work observes the phenomena and mechanisms of luring, adaptation, parasiting and survival, similar to the one mentioned above. The artist is interested in the invisible threads that govern movement and desire by observing how to disrupt habitats, cross unspoken boundaries or live in derivation of a given system; not far from the dérive, in the Situationist sense, which thwarts the constraints of our urban spaces.

In Antoine Dochniak's works, a dialectic of substance takes place, where the natural simultaneously embraces and clashes with the industrial. Beeswax, sunscreen, petals, bulletproof fibres, sparklers, stainless steel, iodine pills, or the aforementioned pheromones – among other components of his pharmacopoeia – are found throughout his sculptures. Like the bee to whom we owe both honey and venom, the artist's practice is a balancing act that consists in making paradoxes converse, a permanent confrontation between predation and prey, poison and remedy and the harmonious and the bellicose. In works that he describes as “fictional zones” – which hold their own legislation and redraw the cartographies in place – he presents the symptom and its counterpart, which would involve care or protection.

If the use of a militarised imaginary suggests the evocation of conflict or catastrophe in the background, our perception remains blurred when it comes to understanding whether the works precede or succeed them. The danger remains impalpable and is perhaps embodied in the evanescence of the waves that punctuate the artist's work, whether they emanate from medical imaging, ultraviolet radiation or atomic radiation. Nourished by a geopolitical apprehension of the world that he re-enacts his poetic interstices, Antoine Dochniak allows the threat to hover while making it dialogue with an environment thus proposing a new score of the links that unite living and non-living species. With his sculptures, he creates place where collaboration can take place, inviting, in his own words, the “forgotten of the production chain”. In contrast to a dominant discourse that prefers individuation to entanglement, he explores the complexity of a world where bees forage not far from nuclear power plants.

Lou Ferrand

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