First created in 1984, the macLYON collection has been built up with works that have appeared in exhibitions at macLYON and the Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art. The collection is regularly supplemented by purchases and donations. Many of the themes running through art history and social history are reflected in the works in the collection. They date from the 1960s through to the present, and reveal specific perspectives on the various issues that have marked that period, from postmodernity to the present.
The exhibition Incarnations, le corps dans la collection [The Body in the Collection] has taken a selection of works from the collection and uses them to explore the way in which artists have appropriated the question of the body, as an artistic object and an object of study, but also as a medium. Devised as an exhibition in two acts, it is open throughout the year 2023 and draws on the full 40 years of macLYON's history.
Act II of the exhibition extends the questions developed in Act I (presented from 24 February to 9 July) not this time through the prism of the organic nature of the body, but in the body's confrontation with the other, with its environment and with the world. The renewed selection of artists and works focuses on how the body experiences, interacts with or is affected by a social and a societal context.
Artists: Marina Abramović & Ulay, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Sunday Jack Akpan, Maxwell Alexandre, Ed Atkins, Edi Dubien, Erró, Eva Fàbregas, Marie-Ange Guilleminot, Thomas Hirschhorn, Smaïl Kanouté, Mohamed Lekleti, George Maciunas, Bruce Nauman, Hans Neleman, ORLAN, Marilou Poncin, Mel Ramos, Alain Séchas, Sylvie Selig, Tavares Strachan,
Claire Tabouret, Xavier Veilhan, Bernar Venet...
Wednesday to Sunday
11am - 6 pm
In macLYON
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Carte blanche to Marilou Poncin
In order to strengthen links between the macLYON collection − presented in the exhibition Incarnations, le corps dans la collection, acte 2 [The Body in the Collection] − and young artists, a carte blanche invitation was extended to Marilou Poncin.
Using a range of media including video, installation and photography, Marilou Poncin’s work affords strange, beguiling, and poetic observations and interpretations of women’s bodies and the place they occupy in public space and the media. While the artist plays with or exaggerates various forms of seduction, both visual and psychological, she also provides precise insights into the ambiguity of inter-human relations.
In a multimedia installation that takes over the museum’s circulation spaces like a sprawl of invading rhizomes, she has created a network that connects images of young women, real or reproduced in silicone, and set in fantasised cityscapes. The installation is based on the artist’s research into the canons of beauty that shape urban public space and, at the same time, women’s bodies. In particular, it illustrates the way in which these canons imposed on women can generate new devices, or responses that tend more and more towards the use of artifice.
Echoing a previous series of works entitled happy sad, which consisted of photographic self-portraits in which she made herself up disturbingly as hyper-realistic silicone dolls, Marilou Poncin has produced a new series of portraits where this time she confronts a media personality: Kim Kardashian. Although this icon of reality TV is celebrated for having radically changed beauty criteria, the fact remains that this new norm has simply replaced the old one. Knowing full well that fashionable body shapes and aesthetic codes follow on one another’s heels and are imposed with the same violence, Marilou Poncin attempts to measure her own body against them. By constructing and deconstructing the imposed image and revealing the artifices, of prostheses and make-up in particular, she draws attention to the distance that separates the natural body from the culturally dictated body.
Marilou Poncin, born 1992, lives and works in Paris.
She is a graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.
Marilou Poncin explores the encounter between our fantasies and cutting-edge technologies. Her work features camgirls, avatars and love dolls, the mainly female characters that populate the internet. Each of the phantasmagorical worlds she explores reveals our individual and collective relationships with the societies in which we live - our tastes and our desires, our shortcomings and our prejudices.
