Le regard qui brûle ⎹ Hors les murs ⎹ Manoir de Kerlaouen, Lesneven (29)

Hanako Murakami

17 May — 31 Aug 2025

Departing from an approach based on fixed images, Hanako Murakami (1984, Tokyo, Japan) considers photography less as a technique than as an act of vision. She explores situations in which the gaze no longer merely perceives: it acts, alters, displaces.
The works gathered here share a common tension: they emphasize alternative modes of image generation – ways of bringing the visible into being that are fundamentally different from known, industrial, or commercial processes. By deconstructing photography’s conventional frameworks, Murakami sketches a reinvention of the medium, somewhere between speculation, science, and a heightened sensory impulse.

In Imaginary Landscapes, early twentieth-century photosensitive materials – never used since their manufacture – react upon contact with the developer. The images that emerge no longer represent the world: they transform it into autonomous forms, hovering between pictorial abstraction and inner vision.
In Possibles (Thermography), heat – rather than light– becomes the matrix of the image. Reviving a 19th century process once imagined and then abandoned, Murakami envisions here a kind of photography that never happened, but might have.

Other works explore the transformative powers of vision itself. In Burning Gaze, a sequence of film excerpts builds a contemporary visual mythology in which the gaze acts as a burning force, threaded with fiction. In Exposure, an electron microscope reveals in real time the effects of light on a sensitive surface: the gaze literally imprints its trace, like an irreversible optical burn. Finally, The Gaze Becomes Gesture overturns the notion of passive... [lire plus]

Manoir de Kerlaouen
48 rue général de Gaulle
F-29260 Lesneven

Exhibition from May 17 to August 31, 2025
Open Thursday to Sunday, 2pm to 7pm
& Monday from 10am to 2pm

Free admission

These exhibitions are supported by the Conseil départemental du Finistère and Tourisme Côte des Légendes Nord Bretagne.

With the support of Nomura Foundation

And in collaboration with Stereolux, Nantes