Férocité à domicile [Ferocity at Home]
Group show with Chantal Akerman, Tolia Astakhishvili (with Zurab Astakhishvili, Simon Lässig and Maka Sanadze), Cudelice Brazelton IV, Rosa Joly, Harilay Rabenjamina, Rosemarie Trockel and Sebastian Wiegand.
Curator: Oriane Durand
Férocité à domicile explores the ambivalence of the maternal bond through the work of seven artists—Chantal Akerman, Tolia Astakhishvili (with Zurab Astakhishvili, Simon Lässig and Maka Sanadze), Cudelice Brazelton IV, Rosa Joly, Harilay Rabenjamina, Rosemarie Trockel and Sebastian Wiegand. With sensitivity and contrasting approaches, these artists intimately examine the way in which this complex relationship constructs our presence in the world.
The film News from Home (1977) by Chantal Akerman constitutes the exhibition’s point of departure, highlighting the complexity of maternal love with captivating clarity. At once a refuge and an insidious trap, this love that the filmmaker’s mother expresses in the letters that she addresses to her daughter, living in New York at that time, oscillates between tenderness, guilt trips and infantilisation. This contradiction—which I call ferocity—is at the heart of the exhibition. It is deployed in artworks in which the maternal figure haunts the space with her presence, as diffuse as it is oppressive, whether it is an upright yet discreet mother in Rosemarie Trockel’s mural fresco; Tolia Astakhishvili’s domestic space under construction; or Rosa Joly’s dark and ghostly dolls’ houses. The home, traditionally seen as a protective cocoon, here becomes the theatre of disorder, a territory of uncertainties, in which intimate space is precarious and fragile. Cudelice Brazelton IV’s “wall-tattoos” and sculptures, as well as Harilay Rabenjamina’s video installation highlight a maternal figure conveying social and aesthetic norms, modelled through the assimilation of racial violence and classism. As for Sebastian Wiegand’s paintings, they extend the examination of the Western political legacy of the 1960s and 1970s. The choice of yellow orange colours combined with the representations of hippie style convoke the utopia of an era marked by sexual freedom, feminist movements and revolutionary hopes. Outstretched on her sofa, the mother nevertheless appears exhausted there.
Between presence and absence, tenderness and dispossession, singularity and transmission of social constructs, these works sketch out a nuanced cartography of the maternal bond. Love, far from being an absolute rampart, does not spare individuals either from the subconscious contradictions inherent to parenting or from dysfunctional relationships. While society (in a traditional nuclear family) assigns to the mother the role of guardian of the home, the father often holds a marginal position there. Consequently, the question of love cannot be dissociated from that of the role assigned to the mother within a patriarchal society: what types of behaviour does this assignation give rise to? What are its repercussions ?
Oriane Durand, Curator
Image: Tolia Astakhishvili, With and Without Light, 2023, view of the exhibition ‘Living Spaces’, Galerie Molitor, Berlin, 2023. Photo: Marjorie Brunet Plaza. Courtesy of the artist.
Related events :
May 17 at 3 PM: Guided tour by curator Oriane Durand, followed by the screening of News From Home by Chantal Akerman.
May 24 at 4 PM: Venenos y bicarbonatos, writing workshop by L. Etchart.
June 7 at 3:30 PM: Workshop around the exhibition for children, led by artist Rosa Joly.
June 28 at 3 PM: Storytelling tour of the exhibition for children, created by artist and storyteller Madiana Kané Vieyra.