Editor
Fabienne Dumont (b. Montargis, France, 1972) is an art historian, art critic and associate professor at the University of Rennes 2, specializing in feminist, gender and queer issues addressed from a cultural, social, and political point of view. After editing the anthology La rébellion du Deuxième Sexe. L’histoire de l’art au crible des théories féministes anglo-américaines (1970–2000) (Les presses du réel, 2011), Dumont published her thesis as the book Des sorcières comme les autres: Artistes et féministes dans la France des années 1970 (PUR, 2014) and went on to co-edit two collective projects, L’histoire n’est pas donnée. Art contemporain et postcolonialité en France (PUR, 2016) and À l’Ouest toute! Travailleuses de Bretagne et d’ailleurs (Les presses du réel, 2017). In 2019, she cocurated at the MAC VAL the exhibition Nil Yalter, TRANS/HUMANCE. On this occasion two books were published with her texts: Nil Yalter – Where the memories of migrants, feminists and workers meet mythology (MAC VAL Éditions) and Nil Yalter: Interview with Fabienne Dumont (Manuella Éditions/ Aware).
Contributors
Cathryn Boch (b. Strasbourg, France, 1968) lives in Marseille. She works from road maps, aerial views, topographic surveys or land use plans that she sews and draws to create new worlds. The delicacy of the papers and the proliferation of threads reveal an environment in constant flux. She confronts territories and the impermanence of borders, as well as the social, political and ecological concerns that are part of them. For Cathryn Boch, confines, demarcations of territory-migrationoccupations-alterations are scars echoing the chaos of human and planetary metamorphoses to come. In 2019-2020 she is in residence at the Domaine de Kerguéhennec in Bignan, where she has a personal exhibition. In 2022, she is in residence at the Cité internationale des Arts, Paris. Her works are notably present in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the FRAC Picardie and PACA, the FNAC, Paris and the MAMCO, Geneva. Cathryn Boch is represented by the Galerie Papillon, Paris.
Ymane Chabi-Gara (b. Paris, 1986) is a painter living and working in Boulogne-Billancourt. She graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2020. Isolation, solitude, the body in relation to the world, and one’s condition as a social being, are the core concerns of paintings portraying individuals alone or in small groups, and in universes and situations that mirror their interiority. Domestic spaces and brownfield sites serve as a setting for narratives guided by colorful formal impressions. Her international accolades include the Takifuji Art Award (Japan, 2020), the Rose Taupin-Dora Bianka Prize, the Sisley Prize for Young Artists, and a nomination for the Emerige Revelations Grant in 2021. Her first solo exhibition was part of the Sisley Prize in 2021. Chabi-Gara is represented by the galerie Kamel Mennour, Paris.
Nina Childress (b. Pasadena, USA, 1961) lives and works in Paris and since 2019 has been teaching at the Beaux-Arts there. After a spell as the muse of the punk band Lucrate Milk in the early 1980s, she joined the Ripoulin Brothers collective and embarked on a painting career devoted to subversion of social norms. Her subjects and models reflect an interest in both popular and scholarly culture, as well as drawing on her own biography. Her work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions, notably at MAMCO Geneva (2009), CRAC Sète (2015), the Fondation d’Entreprise Pernod Ricard (2020) and the Frac Nouvelle-Aquitaine (2021–2022). Published in 2021, the two-volume Nina Childress, 1081 paintings includes a catalogue raisonné and a biography by Fabienne Radi. Childress is represented by galerie Bernard Jordan in Paris and Nathalie Karg Gallery, in New York.
Marie Docher (b. Clermont-Ferrand, France, 1963) lives and works in Paris. A photographer and filmmaker, she is committed to the struggle for the visibility of female and racialized artists. In 2014 she created the research blog Atlantes & Cariatides and in 2018 the interview platform visuelles.art: what gender does to art. She is a member of the La Part des femmes collective, which campaigns for greater equality and diversity in the field of photography, and is the author of Alors je suis devenue une Indien d’Amérique… (iXe: 2014). Her photographs have been exhibited in solo and group shows in Japan (916 Gallery in 2014, MYD Gallery in 2018) and more recently in Arles and Salzburg (2021). Docher is also a contributor to La Déferlante (“The Great Wave”), a journal devoted to feminist and gender issues. In 2021, she was among the winners of the first commission for photojournalists, sponsored by the Ministère de la Culture and the BnF.
Marlene Dumas (b. Cape Town, South Africa, 1953) has been living in Amsterdam since 1976. In paintings and works on paper she addresses the human body via such crucial themes as war, religion, sexuality, love and hate, as well as questions related to her personal history: the art world, racism and Africa. Over the past fifteen years her deliberately uncluttered, powerfully expressive images have been the subject of major solo exhibitions at venues including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2014), the Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2015) and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris and Tate Modern, London (2021). Her one-person show Marlene Dumas: Open-end premiered at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in March 2022. She is represented by Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp, Frith Street Gallery, London, Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo and David Zwirner, New York.
Natacha Lesueur (b. Cannes, France, 1971) has studied at the Villa Arson in Nice and now lives and works in Paris. Since 1993 her work has been essentially photographic, anchored in a hybrid world and bent on sabotaging stereotypes—both those that afflict women and those that circumscribe photography. In works mingling painting, sculpture and performance, she subverts her characters and pseudo-portraits with forms of imprinting, collage, grafting, and the incongruous strangeness of chimeras. Winner of the Ricard prize in 2000 and a resident at the Villa Medici in 2002–2003, Natacha Lesueur has exhibited widely in Europe, the United States, Korea, and China. In 2021–2022, the Villa Medici in Rome presented a retrospective accompanied by a major monograph. Natacha Lesueur is represented by the galerie Eva Vautier, Nice and the Galerie Clara Maria Selz, Düsseldorf.
Deborah de Robertis (b. Luxembourg, 1984) is a video-maker and performer living and working between France, Brussels and Luxembourg. Her performances are consonant with the visual history of feminist art, formulating a discourse based on the materiality of the identified female body. Her approach consists notably in reinterpreting the models of paintings or photographs and producing a kind of embodied image. For De Robertis, nudity is the aesthetic/political interpretation of an artistic work or, more precisely, of the female subject of that work (the model) and her relationship to the public. Deborah de Robertis’ numerous performance venues in Europe include the Musée d’Orsay, with Édouard Manet’s Olympia (2016); the Louvre, with Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (2017); and Lourdes and the Champs-Élysées (both 2018).