Oana Ivan Gallery presents Aline Coquelle's first exhibition in a parisien art gallery. Trained in art history and anthropology, a film and more recently digital photographer and great traveler, for the past twenty years she has been building a visual corpus nourished by fieldwork, exchange and intuition. Known for her many books published by Assouline - from Palm Springs to Zanzibar, via the polo riders of whom she is a privileged observer - she has returned to France after more than ten years in East Africa. “Beyond Borders” unfolds a series of photographs conceived as a narrative of fragments, where territories and people meet and respond to each other without hierarchy.

“I've always been a nomad, and I'm delighted and honored that Oana Ivan Gallery has become my new  “Maison” parisienne. An exclusive setting in which to share and exhibit my photographs with Oana Ivan's visionary, rigorous and inspiring eye. 
Our lives dissolved into our respective travels. When I heard she was opening an art gallery in Paris, I congratulated her. The stars aligned. One of these new horizons, and part of my roots, will from now on be here at the Oana Ivan Gallery.This exhibition, which we thought up together, reveals a more personal and artistic aspect of my work. It's a return to my roots, a Voltaire-style journey."
Aline Coquelle

Aline Coquelle’s photographs reveal the stories, experiences and points of view of people we don't always hear from here. Bringing these images back to us means crossing borders and bringing together peoples, pieces of lives that might never have crossed paths otherwise.

"Having lived most of my life in remote parts of the world, I look for this alliance between these disparate but sometimes complementary worlds. I like to see Difference valued; a Kenyan lion in dialogue with an Argentine horse, a renowned Rwandan designer surfing the thousand-year-old waves of the Indian Ocean from Sumba to Indonesia. Contrasts attract. 
“My" Mongolian horses gallop along rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, my adoptive father Maasai Kimakoni, son of Ntatuya and Maama, meditates in the heart of the gallery, and the mythical Zambezi Falls (Mosi Oa Tunya, The Smoke that Thunders, Victoria Falls) crash just a stone's throw from the Bristol.
It's the signature, the soul, the “Mana” of this “Beyond Borders” exhibition. The harmony of multiple universes coming together in a single World imagined together."
Aline Coquelle

To accommodate this rich, multiple and abundant vision, it was necessary to create several sections echoing and resonating with each other in the gallery space. Thus, the first part of Oana Ivan Gallery offers a more intimate panorama, revealing large-format colour and black & white portraits of Rwandan designers, immersed in a symbiosis with the nature that surrounds them. The pulsation of colours counterbalances the depth of black and white. A simplicity that's always direct, going straight to the heart of its subject: no borders here either, but privileged, intimate access to a scene of life, a prayer to nature, or the natural force and hypnotic power of water. 
The liquid element as a source of creation, inspiration and even meditation is one of the common threads running through this exhibition. Her images seem to possess a certain magical aura, and the powerful attraction they exude makes us want to stay in front of each photograph long enough to discover its secret.

"More than ten years ago, Oana published my photographs of a part of my life in India, with the followers of Mahatma Gandhi. The way she brought this subject up to date in Frame/Book/Magazine, an art and lifestyle publication, won me over. She has captured the way in which ancestral traditions can sometimes be blatantly modern, and how the timeless becomes modern by transcending social and geographical boundaries.
This is the motto of my life and my work. Oana understood this immediately, without me having to explain it to her, as if it were self-evident. This kind of encounter is rare and precious."
Aline Coquelle

Further into the gallery space, slightly hidden from view, a section is devoted to what we'll call “her cabinet of curiosities”. It serves its purpose well: to introduce us to her world, the one she's been building up over the years, nourished by photographs, objects, fabrics and frames, each of which carries a story. To find oneself in front of this cabinet is to find oneself in the presence of time that passes, that leaves its mark, made up of memories, moments of creation, sharing and encounters. By recreating her cabinet of curiosities on the gallery walls, Aline Coquelle offers us a unique perspective on what constitutes her as a photographer, a woman and a citizen of the world.

To write about photography is to write about the world. And these essays are in fact an extended meditation on the nature of our modernity. Suzanne Sontag's phrase about her essays could be applied to Aline Coquelle's way of photographing, and even more so to her way of thinking about the image.

Aline Coquelle asserts her admiration and friendship for three great photographers who are masters in their field: Peter Beard, Don McCullin and Mirella Ricciardi. Perhaps the real link between these three photographers lies in the need to photograph and document without remaining on the surface of things and people. Each in his own way transcends what is in front of his eyes. Following in their footsteps and influenced by their work, Aline Coquelle photographs without alteration, yet with genuine subjectivity. A sincere osmosis with her subject shines through, bringing a unique character to the image. Aline Coquelle surprises us with an eye that is always just right, at the right distance from her subject.

Aline Coquelle's approach and her way of observing the universe are driven by the profound nature of species, whether human, animal or plant, and by her reflection on what images can do, both in capturing them and in transmitting and reproducing them. Much more than an exhibition of simple snapshots brought back from the four corners of the globe, what is proposed here is a truly immersive journey through the exploration of a great artistic sensibility. 

In this way, Oana Ivan Gallery wishes to show the different facets of Aline Coquelle's artistic practice, which is constantly developing a varied but coherent body of work, always driven by this mastery of her subject and her ability to immerse herself in it entirely, with emotion and restraint, fervour and modesty.