Zabo ChabilanD
Zabo Chabiland (b. 1968) is a French visual artist working in the fields of contemporary photography, video and sound performance. She has lived and worked in New-York and Berlin and is currently living in the Loire Valley in France.
She studied photography at the International Center of Photography in New York in the full -time general studies program (1988).
Growing up in a creative environment, she learned early on to build bridges between different mediums. During long periods of experimentation, she confronted photography with non photographic materials and X-ray film following her personal path and pace through series questioning the notion and the codes of portraiture, the “positive” and “negative” rendering, the borders between the visible and the invisible. She developed over time a consistent body of work composed of series that all flow from each other. “Polyptych”, “Corps en Suspens”, “X-ray Portraits”, “Profiling Watermarks”, “Neuzusammensetzung”) mobilize the gaze of the viewer, the scotopic vision or its understanding of portraiture.
Simultaneously, her sound experiments emerged as a counterpoint to her laboratory work. Her sound performances rely more on a script than on a score: it is not a matter of “playing” music, but of inventing devices, establishing protocols for them, and putting them into practice, working solo: “Elbow in C,” “DDR-DPRK trägheit,” “Sleeping Odyssey,” “Piano Strikes,” “Piano Stripes for 36 Hands,” and in collaboration: “Bzzb,” “Nothing else mattress,” “Funkspeil,” “Wasteband,” “Point Nadir.” Her first vinyl, “Watewah-Sleeping Odyssey,” was released in 2020 on the Grautag Records label, founded by artist Nicolas Moulin. Her solo exhibition Anatoms Sonores is on view at the RDV Gallery in Nantes through May 2, 2026.