Amélie Bouvier, detail of Astronomical Garden I, 2025, textile collage, 300 x 400 cm - 118 x 157 in.
Opening: Thursday, September 4, 2025, 17:00 - 21:00
Exhibition: September 4 - December 13, 2025
The cosmos is a dizzying thought, involving scales of time and space which are difficult to conceive of in a short human lifetime, though our species has developed languages to make sense of that which surpasses us: myth, science, poetry. For more than a decade, artist Amélie Bouvier has explored how society observes and interprets the sky, examining astronomical imagery through the lenses of history, desire, and imagination.
During this time, she has pursued a series of collaborations with leading research institutions, including the Harvard College Observatory, the University of Namur, and the Observatoire de Paris - site Meudon. This exhibition focuses on her work with the archives of the Observatoire de Paris, where she studied fragile glass-plate photographs of the Sun. These negatives paint the Sun as a pale shadow, scarred by fingerprints and scratches accumulated over more than a century.
The exhibition begins with Calibration, a drawing created from test photographic plates (also known as calibration plates), which were used for focusing the telescope at the Observatoire de Paris – an essential, yet unseen step in the astrophotography process. When reproducing portions of these calibration plates, Bouvier began taking measures of her own image-making: noting the time she spent on each drawing, the tools she used, the variations in her mental state. Here, the drawing introduces the visitor to Bouvier’s practice of translating scientific images into an artistic language, while also reflecting on her own methods of observation.
The large-scale textile collages Astronomical Garden I and II, immerse viewers in scenes that unfold like theatrical backdrops. Conceived in the tradition of Romantic stage scenery, each panel functions as a setting in itself. Their title recalls the cultural form of gardens, where, throughout history, human fantasies of Paradise and order have been projected onto nature. In Bouvier’s gardens, the earthly plants are replaced with extraterrestrial elements: Astronomical Garden #1 depicts the surface of the Moon, while #2 features falling celestial objects, from meteor showers to satellite crashes.
Each collage is composed from a hybrid archive that brings together ancient manuscripts, online databases, and specialized scientific collections. Images are enlarged, redrawn, digitized, printed on cotton, and sewn together, creating landscapes that merge centuries of knowledge and speculation. By borrowing equally from myth, speculations, and hard data, the works question our relationship to astronomical imagery, in a world flooded with stimuli and bent on spatial colonisation. Like gardens, these landscapes are both natural and artificial. They invite viewers to reflect on how narratives shape perception, how reality and illusion blur, and how our visions of the cosmos are inspired by fantasy and mythology as much as they are by science.
Encircling the larger installations, a constellation of drawings from various series punctuates the gallery. Fragments of Sunlight, Solar Dust, and Moonlight on the Sun continue Bouvier’s investigation of the Meudon archives. These works are created through what the artist calls photodessinographie, a process which entangles photography and drawing. In each series, Bouvier moves fluidly between ultra-precise lines and quick, gestural marks, between subtractions and additions, eruptions of color and zones of absence. Solar flares, scratches, smudges, and the blurred traces of handling are all carefully rendered. What once appeared accidental or unwanted in the original plates is given equal weight with the celestial body itself. Through this approach, Bouvier proposes a new role for archival images that are no longer scientifically useful: they become surfaces where fragility and detail invite sustained attention, where the limits of human vision across space and time become perceptible.
The smaller series of rectangular panels titled Solar Dust concentrates on fragments of the original glass photographs, where textures and forms collide in minute detail. Fragments of Sunlight, a single work composed of six assembled drawings, suggests another way of piecing together dispersed traces of information. This exploration culminates in Moonlight on the Sun, where Bouvier returns to the glass negatives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In these works the Sun is always centered, as in the archival images, yet partially erased by the marks of time. Fingerprints, cracks, peeling emulsions, and chemical dissolves interrupt the cosmic record, at once human and elemental. By redrawing both the Sun and its deterioration, Bouvier emphasizes the fragility of knowledge itself. The immense power of the star (source of both life and eventual destruction) appears diminished, trapped in the fragile panes of glass. Each fissure or blemish carries its own meaning, accidental yet preserved by the artist’s hand. The archive emerges not as a static record but as a living entity, shaped by the interactions of those who use, consult, and sometimes damage it. Like the Sun itself, these images move through cycles of appearance and disappearance, decay and renewal.
The exhibition concludes with Quadrivium III, a kinetic sound installation that transforms a telescopic image of the Swan Constellation (Cygnus) into a musical score. As the instrument rotates, it produces dissonant chimes which fill the gallery. This translation of data into rhythm and light reimagines the sky as a place for song, the machine as a tool for poetry.
Together, these works study scientific imagery to suggest another way of approaching the cosmos: less as an object to be measured than as a vibration to be felt, dreamed, amplified.
Amélie Bouvier (b. 1982) lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.
Her artistic practice builds from historical research in the field of astronomy to question issues related to cultural memory and collective heritage. Astronomers in particular, and scientists in general, don’t only explain the world, they also represent it through the construction of diagrams, illustrations, photographs or equations. For Bouvier, scientific imagery is an extension of knowledge that reveals ideological and ethical frameworks, which risk cloaking aspects of the reality they aim to represent. She is particularly interested in the sky and stars as a landscape that exposes current socio-political contradictions and knowledge gaps. While her work is based on historical facts, data and visuals, she consistently mixes this with speculative imagery, adapting tools and techniques to present alternative potentialities.
Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including the Aomori Contemporary Art Centre (Aomori, JP); Galeria Arsenał (Białystok, PL); CHRONIQUES - Biennale des Imaginaires Numériques (Aix-en-Provence, FR); ISELP contemporary art center (Brussels, BE); and the Museo Patio Herreriano (Valladolid, ES). She has participated in group exhibitions at the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles (Paris, FR); Le Pavillon Namur (BE); Festival Safra’Numériques (Amiens, FR); Sesc Ipiranga (São Paulo, BR); the Verbeke Foundation (Kemzeke, BE); the Museo de Arte Prehispánico Rufino Tamayo (Oaxaca, MX); the Cerveira International Art Biennial (Cerveira, PT); and many others. Her first monograph, Staring Into the Night, was published by Hopper & Fuchs in 2024.
