Pierre Ardouvin, Bianca Argimón, Kader Attia, Élisabeth Ballet, Jean-Luc Blanc, Véronique Boudier, Nina Childress, Gaëlle Choisne, Clément Cogitore, Olivier Debré, Mathilde Denize, Romina De Novellis, Edi Dubien, Mario D’Souza, Éléonore False, Sylvie Fanchon, Valérie Favre, Esther Ferrer, Nicolas Floc’h, Mark Geffriaud, Shilpa Gupta, Kapwani Kiwanga, Jirí Kolár, Thierry Kuntzel, Emmanuel Lagarrigue, Ange Leccia, Natacha Lesueur, Annette Messager, Myriam Mihindou, Marlène Mocquet, Charlotte Moth, Frédéric Nauczyciel, Melik Ohanian, ORLAN, Bruno Perramant, Françoise Pétrovitch, Abraham Poincheval, Judit Reigl, Pierre Soulages, Agnès Thurnauer, Jean-Luc Verna, Catherine Viollet, We Are The Painters…
Whether new or old, the works here evoke the reinvention of the self, the future that we must create with our bare hands.
In this shared experience of the obstacles to others and contact with them, of the violent realisation of our bodily fragility and our status as a living body, projecting ourselves into the future and envisaging it with desire, impulse and hope becomes a new kind of imperative.
The works gathered here speak of corporality and its language, of vital fluids, limbs, including hands, which embody the question of self-reinvention in the face of reality, fatality or social determinism.
Fiction, storytelling, staging, and cross-dressing are all strategies used by artists to engage in this reinvention, whether gentle, deter-mined or more warlike.
Addressing the other, their gaze as well as their body, is at the heart of the works. It is done in the making of one’s own image, in portraits or self-portraits that resonate with the historical and contemporary phenomena of the invention of the self.