The exceptional installation at the exhibition LES ARTS VAGABONDS AUX JACOBINS
Svetlana Arefiev’s scrolls as part of Les Arts Vagabonds exhibition at the Église des Jacobins in Poligny, in September 2025
AU MOMENT








In the inhabited silence of the Église des Jacobins, Svetlana Arefiev’s monumental scrolls rise and fall like breaths suspended between sky and earth.
Unrolled from the Gothic heights of the nave to the raw concrete floor, they embrace the sacred space and transform it into a theater of images and stories.
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These works are not simply hung — they are placed, installed, rooted in the architecture.
Each scroll, fluid and vertical, invites a reading that is neither frontal nor static. The viewer moves around them, dives into the details, gets lost among faces, symbols, and mythological or intimate echoes. The space becomes a sensory matrix, where the boundaries between artwork, site, and viewer dissolve.
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The dreamlike characters, both fragile and powerful, seem to be born from the walls, slide down the columns, and spill onto the floor like embodied thoughts. The installation thus offers a living display, in dialogue with the site: the medieval vaults become an extension of the lines, the ancient stones welcome the gentle strangeness of contemporary figures.
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This exhibition is more than a presentation: it is an immersion, a visual ritual, where art escapes the confines of two dimensions to inhabit space as a body, a breath, a memory.