The 1000 Lives of Isis (Les 1000 Vies d’Isis)

Brodbeck & de Barbuat

2020 — France

About this series

The 1000 Lives of Isis highlights an imaginary character, created by computer. A virtual identity whose daily life we come to narrate, staging the invented feelings of a woman, sort of muse of the digital age, whom we discover in a disturbing hybrid humanity. In parallel to these classical-looking photographs, smaller composite images evoke the process of Isis’ birth at the heart of the machine. The project thus questions our own humanity, what connects us to the living and our link with reality and it’s representation.
The project was born in 2020 during the period of containment of the Covid-19 pandemic with the support of the Jeu de Paume museum and the Cnap. The complete project entered the French national collections in 2022.

Photographer: Simon Brodbeck and Lucie de Barbuat
Nationality: German-Franco artist duo
Based in: Paris, France
Website: www.brodbeckdebarbuat.com
Instagram: @brodbeck_debarbuat

Brodbeck & de Barbuat (Simon Brodbeck and Lucie de Barbuat) are a Franco-German artist duo based in Paris. Since 2005, their projects have taken the form of ensembles that question the history of photography and the representation of reality in contemporary images. Inspired by beliefs linked to the mystery of the soul, their work captures Man’s silent melancholy in different ways, highlighting the gap between his existence and the world of dreams.
Fellows of the Villa Medici, French Academy in Rome from 2016 to 2017, they are graduates of the École nationale supérieure de la Photographie in Arles, and the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales in Paris. Winners of the national photographic commission  « Image 3.0 »  in partnership with the Jeu de Paume and the Cnap national collections in 2021, they were awarded the Prix Jeune création 2013, the HSBC Award for Photography in 2010 and the Nestlé prize at the Festival Images Vevey 2010.
Their work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Fotomuseum in Antwerp, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, the Villa Médicis in Rome and the Institut français du Japon, and group exhibitions including the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, the Arsenale in Venice, the Cairo Biennale, the Saatchi gallery in London, the Museum of Photography in Thessaloniki and the Mucem in Marseille, among others.