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 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.
In parallel, she developed another body of work of moving images and sound performances, solo (“Elbow in C, “DDR-DPRK Trägheit”, “Sleeping Odyssey”), or involving numerous collaborators (“Piano Stripes for 36 Hands”, “Nothing else mattress”, “Piano Strikes”, “Piano Strike”). Her first vinyl "Watewah-Sleeping Odyssey" was released in 2020 on the label "Grautag Records” funded by the french artist Nicolas Moulin. “Anatoms Sonores” (2024) an edition of 250 records pressed on X-ray film merges her two principal mediums: photography and sound performance.