Sarah Derat, Tétris, sculpture, 2012 , biennale de Sélestat 2013

Sarah Derat, Tétris, sculpture, 2012 , biennale de Sélestat 2013

Sarah Derat’s works do not reveal their darkness on first sight. Only when they get close enough do viewers grasp the true subject and the brutal discrepancy between a work’s naivete and its horror or banality. Derat moves away from the ordinary treatment of news items in art, the ambiguity of her work lying in the fact that the starkness of the events does not make it impossible to present them; it is the viewers’ troubled reactions which become important.
For Tetris, Derat created a chessboard out of plastic flowers once used as grave ornaments, subverting this ritual and generating a contradiction between the attractiveness of these flowers and the omnipresence of death that they suggest.