5 October 2023 — 25 January 2024
Fondation Francès
21 rue Georges Boisseau
92210 Clichy
France

Exhibiting Artists: Marina Abramović, Kader Attia, Romain Bernini, Jonny Briggs, Michael Ray Charles, Nina Childress, Tracey Emin, Nan Goldin, Oda Jaune, Lebohang Kganye, Phumzile Khanyile, Jakob Lena Knebl, Senzeni Marasela, Roghayeh Najdi, Nazanin Pouyandeh, Valérie Oka, Ashley Hans Scheirl, Amadou Sanogo, Sandy Skoglund, Mircea Suciu, Jeanne Vicérial, Bri Williams, Philemona Williamson.

Fondation Francès presents I am not what you see of me, an exhibition structured around several perspectives on the body, feminism and gender. Starting from an installation created by Ashley Hans Scheirl and Jakob Lena Knebl, it relays discursive views, highlighting expressions of the body and gender negotiated on the margins of the frameworks imposed by heteronormative and heterosexist societies.

The Portrait of a Lady, Green directed by Jakob Lena Knebl and The So-Called Money Shot by Ashley Hans Scheirl constitute what the duo calls a Soft Machine, a heterotopic space mixing architecture, design, visual arts and fashion, among others. The bodies are fragmented, staged, juxtaposed, hybridized, in perpetual transformation. As an extension of Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto, they transgress established social norms and conventions to celebrate the fluidity of genders and identities but also of artistic techniques and mediums ("My art is "trans": transgender, transgender, transmedium", Ashley Hans Scheirl).

Based on the questions that this space of resistance generates, we wanted to highlight different critical postures, often feminist, which, through the acting body and lived experiences, question the way in which social constructions and the codes that They generate and shape our behaviors, our languages ​​and self-expressions.

Discursive, reflexive, political, polemical, the exhibited works develop different strategies of resistance and opposition: performance and the diversion of gendered clichés and stereotypes; the highlighting of invisible bodies; the reappropriation of violence of all types, used as a tool of creation and support for repair; the subversion and emancipation of representations of the body.

Articulated around the body and its socially determined representation, each points to a personal or shared experience which, as soon as it is designated and given form, becomes political (“the personal is political”).