Brognon Rollin - Biography, exhibitions, news and artist's artworks

Brognon-Rollin work with raw, often marginal social material where the recurrent themes are confinement, expectation and control...

With Fate will Tear us Apart (2011), the lines of destiny collected in the palms of hard drug users radiate the walls in a flash of neon. The 8m2 Loneliness clock scans the interrupted time of the prisoner in his cell. With Cosmographia (Gorée Island) (2015), they create a crazy and monumental piece that physically archives the contradictory reality of the island between prison and escape: centimetre by centimetre, for 6 days, the 2.4 km of the island's layout is traced on paper, 3,066 layers sent by post to be stored and sealed in a stainless steel shelf. In 2017, they produce Résilients, a 6-metre-high sculpture, in collaboration with workers from the Caterpillar factory in Gosselies (Belgium) during the last months before the American manufacturer closes the site. A work as a remnant of an immense know-how and which testifies to the psychological violence of a factory closure towards the 2,500 people concerned and a heavily affected region. On the occasion of the Biennale d'Art Contemporain de Melle, with the work Until Then (Saint Savinien) (2018), they invite a line sitter from New York to wait in an 11th century church for the death of a patient by euthanasia. A performance that lasted 26 days. In 2020, on the occasion of their first museum monographic exhibition at the MAC VAL, Museum of Contemporary Art in Vitry-sur-Seine, entitled The penultimate version of reality, they present 24 H Silence (157 min/1440 min), a jukebox containing 80 45-rpm discs. On each side is engraved a minute's silence, observed somewhere in the world after a tragedy: a terrorist attack, an illustrious death, a natural disaster, a mass shooting...

Their works are parts of several public collections: The Israel Museum - Jerusalem, Israel / MAC VAL, Musée d'Art Contemporain du Val de Marne, France / Collection MUDAM, Luxembourg / BPS22 - Musée d'Art de la Province du Hainaut, Belgique / Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP), France / MAC'S - Grand-Hornu, Belgique / FRAC Alsace, FRAC Poitou-Charentes, FRAC Lorraine, France…