In this exhibition Louis-Philippe Côté places images related to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident on the same plane as the remarkable photographs Edmund Engelman secretly took in Dr. Sigmund Freud’s apartment a few days before the latter fled Vienna in June 1938. This investigative project presents, side by side, two areas under high surveillance: the one by Japanese authorities, and the other by the Nazi henchmen of the Gestapo. The similarity between the juxtaposed images lies in a formal, projective, psychic and hierarchical perspective. At once a psychoanalytic geography, historical dyschronia, and “mythological/technological” inversion, more than anything else the exhibition shows the twilight atmosphere of the two tragedies.

The works in this series were presented at Québec City’s VU Photo early this year. Galerie Simon Blais will now put them on view in the intimate space of its Gallery 3. Visitors will therefore be physically surrounded by these 15 works comprising photographs of calamities.