Lou Masduraud

To describe her artistic research, Lou Masduraud speaks of an expanded sculptural practice: a set of eclectic gestures combining artisanal techniques and conceptual approaches. She is interested in collective life spaces and practices, as well as in the systems and ideologies that make them possible. In her installations—often created contextually—she explores the formal and informal networks of human activity. The more or less visible machinery and infrastructure (electric grids, public lighting, sewers, underground systems), which constantly pump and discharge the flows essential to urban life—lampposts, air vents, basement windows, fountains—become portals into the inner body of the city. In these interstitial spaces, she opens phantasmagorical realms, exaggerated mirrors of reality from a critical and feminist perspective. Whether addressing emotional economies within labor and hierarchical chains, politics of self-organization and intellectual emancipation, or our relationship to public space, ecology, and ecosystems, her works serve as objects through which to rethink our relationships to each other and our environments. Combining sculpture, installation, and artisanal know-how, the artist creates alternative phantasmagorical worlds to dominant realities, offering the experience of this transformation of the everyday as a form of emancipation.

Lou Masduraud was awarded the Federal Art Prize in 2024 and received the Manor Cultural Prize of the Canton of Geneva in 2023. She has presented her work in solo exhibitions (MAMCO Geneva, Kunsthaus Langenthal, Kunstraum Riehen, Institut Français in Berlin, Ada Project in Rome, CAN Neuchâtel, La Maison Populaire Montreuil, BF15 Lyon) and in group exhibitions at European institutions (MAMCO Geneva, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Centre d’Art Contemporain de Genève, Villa Medici in Rome, CAPC Bordeaux, CRAC Alsace, MCBA Lausanne, Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, Kunsthaus Hamburg, Kunsthalle Basel, Lyon Biennale, Moscow Biennale…).