GISÈLE VIENNE GISÈLE VIENNE TRAVAUX 2003 – 2021

Gisèle Vienne who is featured as a Festival d’Automne Portrait has joined forces with the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, and there, in amongst the museum collections, will exhibit original works she has created as a choreographer, visual artist and stage director.

Since 2003, the Franco-Austrian artist Gisèle Vienne has made some sixty dolls, all clearly strange and disturbing. These are not inert objects but depictions of adolescents, both girls and boys, and characters in her plays, sometimes speaking through ventriloquism. The exhibition GISÈLE VIENNE TRAVAUX 2003-2021 is an opportunity to enter into the universe created by this prominent figure in contemporary art and the performing arts. “The color of anguish. Pallor, glazed eyes staring blankly, faces motionless, sometimes with bloodstains or tears, come to life in a teenage attitude, voices muffled – all clues hinting at a culture of violence, repressed yet haunting our myths of innocence and purity bathed in white. [...] What can Gisèle Vienne’s dolls tell us about ourselves, about you? What tales are told? Tales of defilement, of injury, dolls disfigured by indifference, desire, and salacious laughter. Can they force us to look at what is in front of us, to hear, to believe? For the dolls are so white, that the color of anguish grabs us by the throat, twists our guts.”
Elsa Dorlin, philosopher