Florence Lazar (born in Paris in 1966) is an artist, filmmaker and photographer. In her work, she focuses on bringing out minority narratives in particular geographical and social contexts. The use of inquiry and attention to the process of transmitting history are at the heart of her work [...].

At the end of the 1990s, at the end of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, Florence Lazar grabbed a video camera and went there. She needed to understand what had just taken place in this territory, which was both close, because of her family history, and foreign, because she lived in France and didn't speak the language. The documentary form thus makes its appearance and imposes itself durably in her work.
The artist has thus made a series of films on different situations resulting from the conflict in ex-Yugoslavia (the end of the war, the fall of Milošević, the creation of a special court in Belgrade to judge war crimes, the rewriting of history in the Serbian Republic of Bosnia).
At the same time, she has explored other geographical and social contexts, focusing on the urban restructuring of a city in the Parisian suburbs, Montfermeil, or more recently, on the consequences of the massive use of the pesticide Chlordecone in Caribbean banana plantations.

All of these works propose a re-reading of events and question the notion of transmission in contexts of hindrance or erasure of collective memory. These problematics continue in his photographic work where national and transnational debates around the period of decolonization and fragments of the history of the French self-managed left are reanimated [...].

In the film Les Paysans shot in 2000 at the end of the war, a Serbian peasant delivers his vision of the regime from Milošević. Kamen - The Stones (2014) traces the way in which the falsification of history is imposed as an extension of ethnic cleansing in the current Serb Republic of Bosnia. With a dissenting and feminist voice, the women in black (2002) speaks group shows an off-screen view of the war in the former Yugoslavia. In Confession d'un jeune militant (2008), the artist's father presents his library and redraws an intellectual and militant path through the French left.

Florence Lazar's photographs and films question the testimonial function of any representation, when it is measured against the narrative of events that endanger humanity. Her films question the conditions of the gaze, of the perception of a current event in its context. Recorded directly in the field, in ex-Yugoslavia, Serbia, Montenegro and Croatia, they treat the event as a stretching of current events and their possible translation.

In a place where the discourse on identity assertions has led to the essentialization of differences and the legitimization of a confrontation, Florence Lazar's films put into situation the words of committed and minority people, taking as a starting point a micro story fact or a narrative that allows us to open a breach in these complex events and to clarify their real processes.

(Source: Jeu de Paume and author's website)