The Burning Archive by Pierre Bessard, a conversation around the “1000” Polaroids of Nobuyoshi Araki
It sometimes happens that accumulation produces emptiness. That saturation, by contrast, reveals a void. POLARAKI arises from this paradox: a thousand Polaroids aligned, ordered, methodically repeated, and yet permeated by a muted, almost metaphysical unease. In the rotunda of the Guimet Museum, Nobuyoshi Araki’s work is not presented as a retrospective but as a magnetic field—an area of friction where the gaze wavers between desire and withdrawal, proximity and erasure. The Polaroid, a medium of immediacy and proof, here becomes an instrument for the dislocation of time. Each image claims instantaneity, yet the ensemble forms a dense, layered duration, almost archaeological. What we contemplate is not a sequence of photographs but a mode of existence of the image: a compulsive, daily form of writing in which the world is endlessly reinscribed, consumed, and renewed. Araki does not photograph in order to preserve; he photographs to keep reality in a state of combustion.
The hanging—906 images arranged in 43 columns of nine frames—follows neither a narrative logic nor an iconic hierarchy. It operates according to an obsessive syntax. Images respond to one another through analogies, slippages, contaminations: flowers and bodies, food and sexuality, sky and bondage. Meaning is never fixed, only suggested, as in a poem that refuses closure. As the eye moves across the installation, it sheds any stable interpretive impulse.
Eroticism in Araki’s work is not a matter of spectacular transgression but of an economy of the gaze. The female body, often bound, exposed, fragmented, is never offered as an object of immediate consumption. It is caught in a network of contradictory tensions: attraction and discomfort, voluptuousness and stupefaction. The recurring practice of kinbaku refers less to domination than to a staging of vulnerability—of the model as much as of the photographer, engaged in an inescapable face-to-face encounter with his own desire. What may be most unsettling, however, are the absences. Within this almost total grid, a few frames remain empty. Not by aesthetic choice, but due to the voluntary withdrawal of two models. These gaps shift the installation into another register: that of ethics. They remind us that the image, however immediate it may seem, is never innocent; that the archive can be contested; that the right to look is never absolute. Here, emptiness becomes more active than abundance.
POLARAKI is also an exhibition about collecting—about the patient, passionate gesture of assembling, preserving, and ordering. By recreating the installation as it existed in the private space of the collector Stéphane André, the Guimet Museum does not merely present Araki’s work; it reveals a relationship, a second gaze, a form of hospitality offered to images. The cabinet of curiosities becomes a museum device without losing its almost domestic, intimate, obsessive dimension.
If Araki’s work has often been reduced to a handful of motifs—sex, death, flowers, food—this exhibition above all reveals a thinking of the medium itself. As early as the 1990s, his use of the Polaroid anticipated our present, saturated with instantaneous, disposable, compulsive images. Yet where the digital image erases its own materiality, Araki insists on the fragility of the object: alterations, cuttings, resins, and manual interventions remind us that every photograph is a body, subject to wear, transformation, and loss. Within the circular space of the rotunda, the visitor is caught in a rotation without a center. There is neither beginning nor end, only a continuous, almost hypnotic movement. POLARAKI seeks neither to persuade nor to shock. It tests. It tests our ability to look without consuming, to desire without possessing, to accept that the image sometimes resists us.
Between the intimate and the collective, between archive and impulse, the exhibition composes a limit experience. A burning archive, in which each image, far from becoming fixed, continues to vibrate—dangerously alive.
Text by: Pierre Bessard, www.editionsbessard.com
Musée Guimet, commissaires de l’exposition: Cécile Dazord et Édouard de Saint-Ours www.guimet.fr