Varda's Third Life

Abstract

Abstract In 2003, following an invitation to participate in the fiftieth Venice Biennale, Agnès Varda started at the age of seventy-five her “third life as a young visual artist,” as she liked to say. During some fifteen years, Varda created over twenty large-scale video installations, numerous smaller ones, and new photographic works, which have been shown in over twenty solo exhibitions and countless group exhibitions in museums, galleries, and art biennials all over the world. This article gives an overview of her installation art and examines how Varda's installations take up and expand on her lifelong passion for still and moving images, painting, photography, and cinema. The author also shows how Varda has rethought and reworked certain subjects that mattered to her throughout her career, by means proper to this new medium. Varda always had the gift to give us the opportunity to reframe our perception of overlooked population groups or objects and to reorient our attention away from the spectacular and extraordinary toward what Georges Perec called the “infraordinary.” If we regard her installations as sites for “active reverie,” we can also comprehend their political dimension as a possible antidote to the current state of the world.