Artistic approach
All my work is there, building bridges
so that everyone finds a personal echo, certainly, but which connects them to the other.
By influencing Sign Language, moving from the individual to the universal is a challenge
to which I want to contribute to the extent of my artistic and intellectual practice."
Arnaud Balard was born in Rodez. He was discovered deaf at one year old and evolved in an oralist world which he describes as abstract sound world. He discovered French sign language (LSF) at the age of 18, when he entered Lycée Morvan in Paris. It's there that begins a rediscovery of his true human and social nature, becoming aware of a whole new expressive movement.
After obtaining the baccalaureate, he followed an eclectic career in the graphic and plastic arts, notably at the Beaux-arts in Rennes, then at the Ecole de la Cambre in Brussels. This course offers him a creative and reflective palette, in an entirely autonomous and free way. He is then interested in the artistic potential of sign language and its intrinsic culture.
His works have a hidden double meaning, revealing the suffocation of pressures, prejudices and social norms linked to deafness and always refusing the label of “disabled artist”.
2008 is a turning point for Arnaud Balard. He discovers new university concepts on audism or audiophonocentrismt and also on Deafhood VS Deafness by creating an innovative current of thought SURDISM. This current of thought created in 2009 radiates today throughout the world.
In 2012, discovering the De-VIA (Deaf View Image Art) in the United States, Arnaud Balard began regular collaborations with them. His many trips to the USA allow him to share the same committed approach.
In 2013, a new major creation appears the international signing flag "SIGN UNION FLAG". The flag wants to represent, in a visible way, the speakers of sign languages regardless of their differences. The Sign Union Flag travels with the wind and people around the world
Since then, Arnaud Balard has continued to theorize and create signs on this world, which he considers unexplored and under-represented in society. His artistic approach is engaged and it revolves around LSF and its unlimited potential for creativity.
Arnaud Balard practices the systemic approach to the relationship between LSF and the fundamentally audiophonic society. He studies different concepts such as diversion, duality, deconstruction, audism, audiohonocentrism and oralism.
He draws inspiration from the practices, forms, symbols and codes intrinsic to the world of the Deaf and signers to recreate a new universe. Arnaud Balard wishes to offer everyone a more understandable and more accessible universe of this paradoxically invisible and unexplored world.
Arnaud Balard work is to challenge our gaze on the other, to arouse our reflection and to change our gaze on the world of signs.
My artistic practice is none other than the expression of a singularity which offers the mirror of its experiences and which shares it with the public, by making discover an unsuspected universe of signs.