Aude Richards et Mina Squalli-Houssaïni / Claire Dessimoz
Our Chimeras / Un Lieu
–
✕
Our Chimeras / Un Lieu image
Our Chimeras / Un Lieu image
Our Chimeras / Un Lieu image
Our Chimeras / Un Lieu image
Our Chimeras / Un Lieu image

Aude Richards et Mina Squalli-Houssaïni
Our Chimeras

Our Chimeras displays soft and disgraced forms. By reflecting on various forms of body representations throughout history, the exhibition invites viewers to rethink the ways in which it has been perceived until today.

The plastic strategy of both artists unveil fluid, polymorphic postures, so to say ‘immature’ aesthetics with no fixed form. Indeed, the artists are interested in references, materials and languages that resist authoritarianism, whether institutional or systemic. The works themselves showcase visual and referential codes often perceived as ‘naive’, ‘adolescent’ or ‘feminine’, in order to question these definitions. Our chimeras use techniques linked to the world of ‘craft’, the latter also being part movement of resistance against globalized neoliberalism.

The two artists embrace fractured, rough, voluntarily unstable and sometimes soft forms. Refusing monolithic postures, the challenge is to use immaturity in order to deliver complex messages, linked to diverse narratives, yet to be reinvented. Aude Richards and Mina Squalli-Houssaïni are therefore interested in reconstructing both common and singular myths.

Women’s bodies (women artists’ bodies, as well as representations of women’s bodies) are too often trapped in a ‘history’ – mostly written by men – of submission and powerlessness. Therefore, deconstructing body paradigms is deemed essential. The practices of Aude Richards and Mina Squalli-Houssaïni fluctuate, adapt and deceive beyond the surface and appearances lay offensive discourses, or ‘alternative’ stories.

Aude Richards (1990, CH) creates soft, meaty and hairy, anthropomorphic and abstract sculptures. Her works addresses the multiplication of representations. The fragments that Aude Richards puts into shape evoke personalities and groups such as Joe Dallesandro, the Dogtown Skateboarders collective, the American Indian Movement, the pre-cybernetic community of Whole Earth, the Cicciolina, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge & Co. These faceless idols are intertwined; they end up either disintegrated or re-embodied.

Mina Squalli-Houssaïni (1994, CH) uses ‘immature’ processes as a Trojan horse. Indeed, her installations both disguise weapons and display female bodies: once attacked, they retort. The viewer is thus confronted with sharp metaphors and narrations, that covertly engage the viewer with anger and revolt.

Claire Dessimoz
Un Lieu

Claire Dessimoz invites you, hosts you, even hands you the keys of the place. You can share what want to share, ask what you’d like to ask: Un Lieu is all about transmission, the desire to learn, and collective and direct participation. From September 15 to October 31, Claire Dessimoz turns Tunnel Tunnel into a safe space, to share your skills, your knowledge and your yearnings to learn.

Claire Dessimoz (1988, CH) is an artist growing mainly as a choreographer and a contemporary dancer. She also works with performance – in between the theater and the bodies, politics and contemporary art – addressing issues related to the idea of reality, transformations and social perceptions.

For more information and in order to apply:
www.claire.dessimoz.org/tunneltunnel

Our Chimeras / Un Lieu image
Photo: Myriam Ziehli
Our Chimeras / Un Lieu image
Photo: Myriam Ziehli
Our Chimeras / Un Lieu image
Photo: Myriam Ziehli
Our Chimeras / Un Lieu image
Photo: Myriam Ziehli