The Fragmented Body: Dust Below the Carpet

The Fragmented Body: Dust Below the Carpet

The works of this group exhibition associate organic bodies with man-made objects normally used to separate interior and exterior. In their works, the artists reflect social tensions of decay, absence or violence where body parts such as arms, feet, torsos, bones, eyes and blood intertwine with architectonic structures, boxes, frames, cans, tapestry, clothes or threads. The fusion of both elements becomes an association of fragments where a chimerical reality exposes itself.

It is unclear whether a barrel of corrosive matter was knocked over or if Aladdin came out of a magic lamp. The dividing line between conscious subjects and unconscious objects oscillates between what is said and unsaid, forgotten and remembered, sealed and perforated, dirty and clean. The artists utilize the fragmented body to address cultural circumstances such as marginalization, religious oppression and abuses of authority. In such conditions, the body appears mutilated, hidden, evaporated, ignored and silenced under brutal truths.

Galatea is dismembered; the myth of Pygmalion inverted itself in a loop. Now that the body became an object the object is not a thing, it is dead. The container made for the masses transformed itself into the mass of an absent individual. It is in these circumstances that the vulnerability of the exhibited work appears in the space through which spectators transit, a place where subjects and objects are interchanged. The work of art is always fragmented and delimited by the parts of its physical and metaphysical body.

Antoine Henry-Jonquères