Thomas James
Exhibition & Residency:
October 1 – November 29, 2015

Born in 1983 in Le Havre, France, Thomas James first studied cinema and now works at the Palais de Tokyo as a documentary filmmaker. He has directed several short-films several group shows.

Currently James defines his practice as: making film without making film, looking for the essence of fiction to generate objects and concepts, returning to the spectator an isolated element for what he is, outside the narrative.

His practice mainly revolves around multimedia installations and video productions of various topics mostly related to society-in-depth-studies. In addition, he focuses on ready-made installations including everyday objects such as TV/Radio sets, saucepans, cellphones, or other mass distributed products.

These arbitrary abstractions, chosen depending on what fascinates or marks it in cinema and its histories, constructs a new fiction whose meaning rises through textual explanations and the invention of spatial arrangements. Such a method is precious today: it is not simply about moving a film from a cinema to a museum, or to construct a wooden structure around a projection, but to create the effective script of the showcase, in the margin, or ahead, of the video.