Ana Zulma

Ana Zulma aka Anne-Laure Gougne is a graduate of Beaux Arts de Lyon. Her artistic practice has developed around a multidisciplinary approach that gives substance to a protean and evolving work. From the early years of her career when Ana was still only Zulma, an imaginary double, a totalitarian and misanthropic creature, the artist retained a deep interest in the forms of self-reflection and world narratives. Exploring the genre of performance, Zulma's character was a pretext to exorcise buried ills by reinventing ways of saying oneself and one's context through the body's action in space. Zulma and Ana, two antitheses that now meet in the avatar of a storyteller artist. Her recent photographic works also borrow from the performative in their realization. Each work is constructed by following a series of rituals. Ana Zulma grabs photographs - her own, those of others - as one grabs a book and observes them carefully in search of the punctum of the image, that point of photography that crystallizes meaning and marks for her the beginning of her artistic interpretation/reinterpretation. Ana Zulma scrapes, pierces, sews, paints, alters the material in the idea of bringing out new readings: magnify the imperfect, favors chance over the obsession for perfection, and finally turns the memory towards the future. Because the artist's approach, often built around series that she enriches over time, responds to her deep desire for reconciliation. In this way, the artist explores the reverberation of opposites, bringing together reality and its ideal, the visible and the invisible, drawing on this in-between, the creative energy of new imaginaries.