Frédéric D. Oberland

Frédéric D. Oberland. Vestiges of the future

Curated by Luce Lebart.

Frédéric D. Oberland’s works unfold a multisensory practice where experimental photography, film and music continually feed one another. Former student at La Fémis, the French national cinema school, he visually works with grainy photographs, poetic observational gestures, and Super8 film, exploring fragile temporalities, flickers and overexposures that resonate with the impermanence of sound. Psychedelic color-grading directly on the negative produces kaleidoscopic images where bodies, landscapes, and rituals dissolve into ephemeral, chromatic traces — ghostly remnants of movement and memory. As a composer, his music emerges from altered states of consciousness suspended between reminiscence and imagination, using long forms that stretch, accumulate, and break open, echoing both geological processes and collective urgencies. 

With Vestiges of the Future, Frédéric D. Oberland exhibits a site-specific installation expanding his eponymous photobook published by Sun/Sun editions. Permeated by the imagery of the page of the book flying away, still and moving pictures, music and whispering words, come together in an audio visual immersive experience where stories are not openly told but must be searched for within ourselves. It captures the sensation of a close call: that flash where life appears all at once, as a flood of hallucinated visions in a trembling world, a quantum space and time inhabited by ghosts, traces of what has just been or what is about to vanish or appear.