Festival International de Mode et de Photographie a Hyeres



In 2007 I won the jury prize at Festival International de Mode et de Photography a Hyeres.
The prize was a rescidence in Villa Nouailles where I made new works that I then worked on with my collage technique.
This week marked the beginning of a series of works that deal with the outside worls in stead of the inside world.
In 2008 I had a solo presentation with these works in the Rose Residence in Villa Nouailles.

A text written by Raphaële Stopin about my work:
Popel Coumou's pictures are sedimentary deposits of spaces, light, times, sensations. The artist was selected for inclusion in the emerging photography competition at the 2007 Festival d'Hyères and won the Prix du Jury. She presented her spaces made out of coloured paper, tracing paper, modelling clay, cut-outs, collages and projections, recreating an architecture that oscillates between a desire for abstraction and ilusion.Popel Coumou's involvement with the villa Noailles is fitting and she returned there in 2008. She spent a week taking photographs, then returned to her studio in Amsterdam to construct.The villa and its mast dominate the hill. Up there, light radiates.It passes through, welling up or boring holes. It is the architect. It is light that models, that enters through the large window or the small crack and, ever powerful, slices up everything in its path. Crosswise. Mallet-Stevens, the other architect, invited light in everywhere, through strip windows, glass walls, and glass roofs. It enters and imposes its own design on his archi- tecture. A villa of stacks, of hollows and recesses, cubes and cylinders, it is an intrinsically on top of this volume. Popel Coumou transfixes it, exaggerates it a little when she needs to. From the contrast between shadow and light emerges the essence of volume. Between the sheets of paper, air circulates and space is inhabited.By the edge of a door, light reveals its accomplice, the other person, the intruder, another walker through walls: Popel. A ghost who remains in the semi-darkness, she hugs the walls, embraces their recesses.Light quickly softens its edg. The half- open door admits a diftuse aura; the shadows lose their sharp outlines and disappear in a pictorialist haze. Upstairs, the windows open onto the hazy light of a summer aftcrnoon, pushing aside the long strips of a curtain, in front of which is a bed. Projections of a holiday fantasy. On the terrace, as the hours pass, chaises-longues languish; in the garden, the tops of the pincs darken.With the sedimentation of the passing hours, the changing light, the intermingling of impres- sions, the image of Popel, exhibited between the walls of the pink living room, allows an architectural and sensorial memory of the place to form. 

Born in 1978, the Dutch photographer Popel Coumou lives in Amsterdam. She studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam. Iln 2007, she won the Prix du Jury for photography at the Festival d'Hyères. In 2005, her work was exhibited at the Fotografiemuseum, Amster- dam (FOAM), and more recently at the Amsterdam Centre for Photography. In 2008, in addi- tion to the present exhibition, her work will be displayed in a solo exhibition at the Maurits van de Laar gallery in The Hague, and will feature in two group exhibitions (Virtueel Muscum Zuidas, FOAM, and Reanimating Reality', Platform 21, Amsterdam).