BOUDOIR

Each element harbours fragments of memories that re-emerge from a collective past life (bourgeois sociabilities, contraptions and costumes, relics of religion and war, trophies celebrating man’s domination of nature, of animals or bodies and far-off cultures…) Through the collage or convergence of contradictory memorial references, the objects, furniture and costumes together generate hybrid and metamorphic forms. The ensemble of elements creates an intimate even mental space and one that is moreover both elegant and delicate. Like an invitation to meditation, introspection and perhaps appeasement, offered and open to the imagination of each visitor.

Steven Cohen will juxtapose this intimate space simultaneously or successively with video recordings of actions effectuated outside in symbolic and memorial places: the inverted double of the boudoir, in which actions from the public sphere will be introduced into the private sphere, actions which were on the contrary based on the exhibition of the private or intimate within the public space. In both cases, the forms and actions – which centre on the metamorphosed body of Steven Cohen – reveal how interior conflicts, representations, oppressions and laws all intertwine.