Férocité à domicile — Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard
With a strong focus on the porous boundary between maternal love and control, the group exhibition Férocité à domicile (Fierceness at Home) a syrupy languor that, through its minimalist staging, reflects the complexity of its subject matter.
Turning inward, toward what cannot be said because it can only be expressed otherwise, the overall tone of the exhibition establishes a deliberately sticky heaviness that conveys both the oppression felt by the child and the shame of imposing on loved ones the normative frameworks of a society complicit in the construction of this figure.
With works that are either expansive or intensely personal, Fierceness at Home immerses us in intimate narratives rich in meaning, moving in their ambiguity, while skillfully avoiding the pitfall of a spoiled child’s lament. Stripped of any moral judgment, the works alternate between totems, fetishes, and images that mark the persistence of a biological and cultural figure — one rarely examined in such terms, and even more rarely explored from so many perspectives.
We move from the comforting frame of the home to an intrusion of the outside world via a remark that re-injects reality into the bubble, in Harilay Rabenjamina’s video; we wander through transit zones in the installations by Tolia Astakhishvili and Simon Kässig, which evoke an unsettling in-between space, caught between past activity and present immobility; and we are confronted with the daily incomprehension experienced by those in existential dissonance, as seen in Rosemarie Trockel’s installation. We drift and run aground with the very beautiful interplay of Rosa Joly’s overturned boat, which both obstructs and adorns the space — a reminiscence of a specter escaped into a photograph from the past — and Sebastian Wiegand’s painting, with its languid figure nestled in the hollow of a sofa, a radical cut into a secret interior.
We also suffocate with Chantal Akerman under the litany of indirect reproaches from a mother wielding language as a vehicle for contagious suffering, and we touch on revolt in Cudelice Brazelton IV’s work, in which a free-form piece stands in stark opposition to a mother’s methodical practice — one in which working the material entails adhering to an external order through organization and control.
A powerful exhibition, then, one that dances on the edge of exhaustion and regret to hold up a sharp-edged mirror to our child-burdened consciences. A mirror that may just as well lose its silver backing and, in revealing what lies behind it, exposes us to the danger of transferring that same weight into our own roles as parents — urging us to question our place within the blindness of the everyday.
Férocité à domicile — Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard, until July, 19th
