Hélène Bellenger | Bianco Ordinario - ENSP Arles - École nationale supérieure de la photographie

Hélène Bellenger | Bianco Ordinario

Bianco Ordinario, or ‘ordinary white’, is the name given to Carrara marble. This name is whispered but not spoken aloud, as it conjures up the image of a common, ubiquitous white, far removed from the rare and immaculate character of Carrara statuary marble. Launched in the summer of 2020, this project by Hélène Bellenger has its roots in the Carrara marble quarries, situated in the Apuan Alps in Italy. Quarried for centuries for the quality of their white marble, highly prized by artists and designers, these quarries are now being overexploited for the production of marble powder – pure calcium carbonate. Used in particular in the manufacture of toothpaste, make-up, paper and cleaning products, marble powder has thus become embedded in the history of ‘whiteness’ (Judith Ezekiel) in our contemporary Western societies.

Through a vocabulary that draws on both photography and the visual arts, the aim is to link the history of dominant representations with that of the transformation of the landscape. Through work that explores the themes of landscape and ecology in the Anthropocene era, as well as visual culture viewed through the lens of feminist criticism, Bianco Ordinario seeks to question the mechanisms by which Western white subjectivity is produced and its impact on the environment and collective imaginations.

This project was developed as part of the Eurazeo Grant for emerging photographers and was exhibited at the Hôtel de l’Industrie in Paris from 7 to 15 April 2022.

Biography

Hélène Bellenger collects and reappropriates images drawn from her contemporary spatial, temporal and digital reality, in order to question their meaning and destabilise their significance. Through this process of appropriating and reusing images, the artist delves into her visual culture and thereby deconstructs the intermediate, political and cultural space of the ‘re’ in representation.

Born in 1989, Hélène Bellenger lives and works in Marseille. Following a university degree in law and art history, she specialised in photography and contemporary art. She graduated from the École nationale supérieure de la photographie (ENSP) in Arles in 2016. Her installations were exhibited in 2016 at Agnès B. in Paris, curated by Alexandre Quoi and Aurélie Pétrel. In 2017, she exhibited at the 62nd Salon de Montrouge, the Salon Variation – Artjaws Media Art Fair in Paris, and at Galerie Binôme (group exhibition *L’œil plié*).

In December 2017, she was invited by the French Institute in Egypt to present her first solo exhibition at the Soma Gallery in Cairo (Egypt). Winner of the Dior Photography Prize for Young Talents for the ENSP, she exhibited at the Grande Halle of the Luma Foundation for the 2018 Rencontres d’Arles. Following a residency in Corsica as part of the Ateliers Médicis programme (2019), she was awarded the Nopoto grant and took part in the mountain refuge residency programme initiated by L’Envers des Pentes, as well as in the Circulation(s) Festival of Young European Photography at the 104 in Paris. In December 2019, the Fonderia 20.9 gallery in Verona (Italy) opened the artist’s third solo exhibition. In 2020, Hélène Bellenger was selected as a finalist in the 9th edition of Talents Contemporains, organised by the François Schneider Foundation.