Being in the World — Exo exo — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Ends in about 1 month: October 7 → November 14, 2026

Artists : Marilou Bal, Ryu Ika, Emilie Pitoiset et Jiajia Zhang

Each day, we navigate the different characters that make us who we are: the intimate self, the physical self, the online self, the social self. Reality unfolds as a continuous line along which we choreograph our successive disguises. We put them on one after another, or layer them on top of each other, not in order to perform or deceive, but simply to be identified, recognized, understood.

Being in the World brings together four artistic practices attentive to the ways we inhabit ourselves: within physical and digital space, in the intimacy of our bedrooms as much as in the public sphere, in relation to ourselves and to others, through our learning processes and our forms of communication. Through the image, and its evocative and symbolic power, each artist explores the performative dimension of identity: who speaks when we speak, and who is actually present in what we see?

JiaJia Zhang, How To Spend It (Attention, Collapse, Affection, Control, Absence, Circulation, Anxiety, Consumption, Afterglow), 2025 — Photo transfer on canvas, label, magazine cutout, photo print — 40 x 50 cm Courtesy de l’artiste & exo exo, Paris

Drawing on the codes and structures of communities, folk tales, social media, and mainstream culture, Marilou Bal, Ryu Ika, Emilie Pitoiset, and Jiajia Zhang examine the languages we borrow and the subcultures we inhabit. They invoke the archetype of the clown, common representations of cuteness and the mascot figure; they fantasize reality television, revisit the lo-fi aesthetics of the Skyblog and Tumblr years, or choose as their setting the disenchanted poetry of the mall as a shared space, reference point, and meeting place.

Taken together, this material constitutes less a repertoire of images than a shared language: a sensitive framework through which our desires for belonging take shape. If being in the world entails negotiating with pre-existing forms, then the challenge becomes to inhabit them from within, drawing out what is held in common, what enables transmission and connection. The works gathered here operate within this precarious balance, between exposure and withdrawal, spectacle and intimacy, entertainment and care, reaffirming identity as a social practice that is continuously rehearsed and renegotiated.

Elisa Rigoulet