LEVITATION
AN IMMERSIVE PHOTOGRAPHIC & VISUAL EXPERIENCE
June 13 - September 27, 2026
MUSÉE DE LA PHOTOGRAPHIE CHARLES NÈGRE
1 Place Pierre Gautier, 06300 Nice
FLORENT MANAUDOU, VICTORIA DAUBERVILLE, ENZO LEFORT,
FRANCE, JAPAN, USA, ANTARCTICA, TURKIYE, OMAN,
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES, SWITZERLAND,
What really happens when a dancer picks up a camera, not to capture the world as it is, but to test its limits?
When a body, already accustomed to tearing itself away from the ground, attempts to inscribe into an image that fragile moment when gravity begins to waver?
For nearly a decade, Mathieu Forget, known to some as Forgetmat or The Flying Man, has pursued this question with an almost silent persistence. Image after image, he has built a body of work driven towards a single point: the moment when reality ceases to be a given and becomes a form of resistance.
LEVITATION brings together this decade of work. Yet to speak of a retrospective would be reductive. It is, rather, a passage, a journey through the evolution of a gaze that has never stopped moving, of a body transformed into an instrument of thought, and of a practice that writes itself directly into the very space it seeks to question.
Presented at the Charles Nègre Museum of Photography in Nice, under the direction of Stéphane Tallon, the exhibition brings together nearly 80 works. The collection is at once expansive and remarkably cohesive. Each image seems to stand on its own while contributing to a broader, almost subterranean cartography. Two projections extend the exhibition further, as though the still image naturally called for something beyond itself.
From New York to Istanbul, from Paris to Los Angeles, to the almost unreal expanses of Antarctica, passing through the Middle East and Japan, a geography of sensations takes shape. Yet what is documented here is not so much the world itself as the repetition of a gesture: with every leap, an attempt to find that point of balance where the body seems to negotiate with the forces holding it back.
And yet, nothing here relies on trickery. No special effects, no artificial suspension. Each image is captured in real time, wrested from a fraction of a second in which physical exertion meets artistic necessity without a filter. Perhaps this is where Mathieu Forget’s singularity lies: in his ability to turn a gesture into an image, and an image into something almost tangible.
The exhibition extends into a 272-page book. Not merely a catalogue, but another space through which the work can circulate. The images breathe differently there, enter into dialogue, and unfold anew at a slower, more inward pace.
Ultimately, LEVITATION does more than seek to show.
It draws us in. It shifts our perspective.
And leaves us with a question suspended in the air.
PHOTOCALL NICE
