Denis Darzacq — Act
Exhibition from 17 March to 29 May 2026
Opening reception
Tuesday, 17 March, from 6 p.m., with the photographer in attendance
Théâtre La Passerelle
137 boulevard Georges Pompidou
05000 Gap
Denis Darzacq’s photographic work focuses on the interactions between individuals from minority groups—whether social, ethnic, sexual, physical, or psychological—and society.
His photographs create a dialogue between paradoxical realities, where the search for balance, through the bodies of the models taking position within the frame, becomes a political metaphor.
ACT is the result of a two-stage project. From 2009 to 2011, in France, Great Britain, and the United States, Denis Darzacq invited young people
and adults with disabilities to leave medical settings and perform actions that were often new to them (ACT 1). While some are actors, athletes, or dancers, all found in action and in the personal appropriation of shared space a way to assert a different image of themselves. Through their condition or their pose, the bodies create tension with their environment and disrupt the established order.
In 2015, the photographer asked the greatest dancers of the Paris Opera to draw inspiration from the photographs of people with disabilities
in the first series. The bodies considered to be the most disabled then became the models
for the classical dancers (ACT 2).
“After my previous work, where I had photographed young people in the prime of their physical glory, it was a way of conquering unknown territory, that is, of pushing back my fear of the other and their difference.”
Excerpt from an interview with
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