Emilie Pitoiset & Jessica 93

The installation You will see the cat before you leave is like a stage set waiting to be brought to life by a musical performance. Its objects are lying there as if abruptly abandoned. The setting the spectator wanders through is a palimpsest of vertical planes and framings. Remnants of clothing and shreds of painted canvases hang from racks like leftovers of some act silenced by oblivion. As
always, a fiction is at work here: an absent gesture being made palpable, rendered visible with a layer of paint that rumples the object and shrivels its use. The object then becomes substance and body, and a medium for different projections. The fabrics are petrified, fossilised, with meaning suspended between the folds of a curtain in an attempt at domesticating the compositional elements and the exhibition space. What has happened or is still to come? In this setting a wig ‘awaiting embodiment’ is activated for a performance with musician Jessica 93. Here you enter through and for fiction.

Images and sculpted or painted objects often conceal convex narratives summoning the view into a role game whose scenario has not yet been revealed. Everything here is dual and unstable: the exhibition, seemingly immobile, becomes the locus of a scene being played, or already played, in which objects become actors. In a mix of fetishisation and embodiment, these “transfer objects” contain repetitions of past acts and latent scenarios for fictional rituals. Thus writing, mise en scène and choreography find their place in Pitoiset’s work, in the complexity of sculpture evocative of costume or a performance transformed into a ceremony.

This exhibition has been organised in association with Pontbriand W.O.R.K.S and the Jeu de Paume, with the assistance of the Getty Research Institute and Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, with the support of Pro Helvetia, Fondation suisse pour la culture and the Mondriaan Fund.