Pauline Tonglet

Pauline Tonglet lives and works in Namur, Belgium. She has studied visual arts at the École Supérieure des Arts Saint Luc in Liège between 1997 and 2000. Pauline Tonglet?'s practice is a combination of art and fiction, personal history and collective past, old documents and visual experiments, iconographic emotions and artistic construction.

Her practice is based on postcards, on family photos that have a certain sentimental value. She adds bits and pieces she connects with her first memories. Once she reached maturity, she abandons personal albums for creating a larger collective visual memory. Her artworks can be interpreted as poetic documentations of certain moments in our civilization, they can be read as traces, layers of its culture, of our global culture.

The artist cuts, arranges, assembles object by their type or by a theme, and she creates intuitively an universe in which all the elements keep having their own voice, while combining in order to express a new and unique reality. All this, from old documents she finds by chance, old letters and faded message, sewing patterns, beautiful pieces of silk paper, old maps showing obsolete frontiers, pages of magazines that went out of fashion reminding us painfully about our fleeting nature.

Their associations gives birth to new messages, and to a different truth. The artist confesses that she wants to give all the ingredients she digs up a new life and that she wants to bring into light these traces that were condemned to be forgotten and destroyed. This way, they can tell a more exciting and beautiful story than the one they were meant to tell.