Heel Turn — Maison populaire, Montreuil
Last part of the triptych of exhibitions Breaking Kayfabe, begun a few months ago at La Maison Populaire de Montreuil, which borrows the lexicon of professional wrestling in order to reflect—alongside it—on the representative and interactive dimension of the exhibition, Heel Turn, under the direction of its curator Camille Martin, continues this exploration of art in action.
Heel Turn — Réda Boussella, Zoé Chataignon et Yannis Mohand Briki @ Maison populaire from September 24 to December 13. Learn more She orchestrates the encounter of three very different works whose dialogue, rich in formal resonances, asserts a sharp and reflective dimension beneath its spectacular appearance. Beyond the energy it deploys, what stands out is above all a form intelligently conceived in its circularity, establishing a succession of continuities and ruptures akin to a staged capture of attention, yet capable of adapting to the very logic of a wrestling show. Embracing the moral fantasy inherent in the staging of this practice, the artists present works that act as characters directly addressing the viewer. They take advantage of the complicity inherent in the mediated relationship of the exhibition to invest in discomfort. For this is indeed an art of representation—so why not play along with those who accept its rules?
This curatorial reflection, lively and incisive, unfolds as a polymorphic meditation on representation. Zoé Chataignon’s frontal approach conjures a carnival of forms, where injunctions and assertions merge with the motif, like the décor of a reflection conducted through line and the instinct of drawing. Giving everything to the spectacle—even down to its foundations—her work here becomes a brutalist ornament, the raw décor of a battle to come, as though a game purging violence by making it its only reality. Behind this almost festive, deliberately grotesque frontality, the other two artists—Reda Boussella and Yannis Mohand Briki—work with a more diffuse acidity. For both, it is a matter of playing with déception—in the French sense, but also in its English meaning closer to diversion or subversion. To outplay the codes of the art world, to deceive its expectations in order to preserve one’s integrity: that is their strategy.
The realm of memory explored by Yannis Mohand Briki deliberately allows voids and absences to surface—signs of a certain indecision. In his work, the video game becomes a self-activated medium for spreading a kind of radioactive, sticky distress that echoes the ether of memory. A vague solitude hovers there, where the search for answers collides with the emptiness of oblivion. Yet a few elements persist as anchors, bearing witness to the subsistence of life. The deceptive here operates through the absence of an explicit discourse, or of the expected reading of biographical issues often linked to artists engaged with social representations.
The figures and entities in Reda Boussella’s polymorphic practice—revealed here with remarkable sharpness—are more overtly corrosive. From punchlines to the liquidation of the icon through a kind of acidic deconstruction reminiscent of horror special effects, déception in his work takes on a more mischievous turn. His sculptures and his series of drawings, beyond their visual impact, strike by their conceptual precision and their interrogation of the gaze—of the expectations of a public compelled to confront them. By playing with the contradictions of a contemporary art world steeped in its own icons, he performs a lap around the ring of this daily spectacle—an ecosystem in constant representation that, in the space and time of the exhibition, gathers both the artist’s commitment and the audience’s engagement.
By adopting such a playful yet shrewd analogy with wrestling, the exhibition invests the field of representation with a welcome directness—turning the tables on both creators and spectators alike. It questions the degree of reality one chooses to invest in this suspension of assigned roles: not only through the artist’s work, but in the very way they embody it, and in how we rely on them to keep the show going. Above all, it offers a possible escape—for the artists, a way to play their lives rather than perform the roles we think have been written for them.
