27.08 -30.10.2026
The exhibition will open on August 28th and will run until October 30th, only by appointement during specific periods.
The show will be open daily during Art-o-rama - August 28th to 30th.
Opening: 27.08 17:00 - 21:00
Mise en demeure
Nina Azoulay, Nina Boughanim, Io Burgard, Veronika Desova, Stanimir Genov, Slava George, Vikenti Komitski, Elvire Ménétrier, Mihail Novakov, Adèle Onnillon, Viktor Petrov, Aaron Roth@Spiaggia Libera Gallery, Marseille
Mise en demeure depicts generic spaces that appear to have been evacuated of all human presence. Persisting in residual form, the bodies that emerge from the margins of the frame are reduced to the shadows of those who created and inhabited these environments. Urban infrastructures, dysfunctional furniture, silent signage, artificial nature: the works presented here tell the story of a world designed by individuals who have set in motion the conditions of their own disappearance. Referring to the legal procedure that precedes a possible seizure, the exhibition’s title evokes a form of forced expropriation, a formal notice issued by capitalist mechanisms that standardize our ways of life and gradually erase all forms of individuality.
An unoccupied holiday residence, a place of transit or consumption, the house in which the exhibition is situated likewise evokes environments that remain impersonal despite their domestic character. Like a show apartment, the villa conveys the notion of a set, a temporary dwelling in which short-term occupants are encouraged to leave no trace of their presence. In opposition to the idea of home or hospitality, this liminal space—suspended between use and abandonment—sketches the contours of a world in which evidence of existence is gradually absorbed by a logic of circulation and profitability.
In The Generic City, architect Rem Koolhaas describes this standardization of spaces as the consequence of a broader dynamic that produces homogeneous forms of behavior. The production of predictable, controllable, and reproducible environments lies at the heart of a liberal system that privileges ergonomics and efficiency at the expense of identity. The spaces in which we move become interchangeable, homogeneous, and subject to norms dictated by flows and consumption. This post-city thus echoes a systemic mechanism, a “place of weak and diffuse sensations, of rare and widely spaced emotions (1).” The casinos, duty-free shops, and falsely opulent postmodern architectures that populate the exhibition evoke so many markers of a commodified society. In this disordered universe, flowers are transformed into seductive facsimiles, ornament and display replace everyday objects, and surveillance cameras seem almost alluring. These endlessly replicated motifs resonate with the thinking of philosopher Sianne Ngai, who suggests that “the gimmick is latent in everything made under capitalism (2).”
The exhibition thus examines the ways in which the economic systems that govern us produce forms of erasure. While industrial capitalism directly exploits bodies, its contemporary tendencies increasingly render them invisible. Behind the fluidity of exchanges, logistical flows, and rental or service platforms, human presences dissolve in favor of interchangeable and continuously available spaces. The home becomes a set, dwelling becomes a product, and lived experiences are transformed into consumable content.
Extending the questions initiated in Tout doit disparaître (Everything Must Go), the exhibition considers disappearance as an insidious process resulting from an enterprise of homogenization that shapes individuals and their ways of existing. It explores strategies of diminishing the body, its progressive distancing, and its invisibilization within environments where everything seems to persist except those who inhabit them.
(1) Rem Koolhaas, « The Generic City », in S, M, L, XL, New York, The Monacelli Press, 1995, p. 1239-1280.
(2) Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form, 2020, p. 47.
Camille Velluet
→ Nina Azoulay (& Adèle Onnillon)
In her composite sculptures combining textiles, ready-to-wear elements, and fragments of images, Nina Azoulay evokes the architecture of the body and the social dimension of clothing without ever allowing the shape of those who wear them to emerge. In the piece created in collaboration with Adèle Onnillon, their respective languages resonate within a shared production suggesting a screen, whose pleats evoke feminine lingerie and silk nightgowns. In another piece inspired by seventeenth-century tapestries, the artist presents an image of intensive fishing embellished with kitten figures that soften the disturbing sight of the photograph, whose resolution is saturated. Questioning our involuntary voyeurism and our resistance to the violence of the content presented to us on a daily basis, Nina Azoulay interrogates our own blindness and our ability to find, within seconds, distractions from a disturbing reality. Her arrangements of artificial plants, presented outdoors, likewise suggest the progressive artificialization of our natural environments in favor of seductive decors.
→ Nina Boughanim
Nina Boughanim’s engraved wooden sculpture explores the construction of a home through the rituals and gestures that constitute it. The boutis—rooted in a Provençal tradition—was one of the elements included in the trousseau of women destined for marriage. Reappropriating this object, on which her initials are engraved, the artist explores notions of lineage and the persistence of certain traditions despite the absence of this object within her own family.
→ Io Burgard
Io Burgard’s neon sculptures draw on the motif of illuminated signage that appears to have been reduced to a form of silence. Playing with the lettering and symbols that she distorts, meaning here is condemned to a stammer, a breath that fails to form the words ordinarily intended to capture our gaze. Similarly, her seats, made from camping chairs covered in quilted leather, evoke the question of paid holidays, as well as the fantasies and nostalgia associated with a time when work did not colonize our free time. Slumped and dysfunctional, these chairs seem to take on the form of tired bodies.
→ Veronika Desova & Slava George
Inspired by artifacts discovered in Thracian tombs in Bulgaria, the armor fragments created by Veronika Desova and Slava George echo the pieces presented on the Art-o-Rama stand. Molded onto their own bodies, these elements refer to futuristic silhouettes that have lost all form of organicity.
→ Stanimir Genov
“Yes, you can go there” is part of a series of paintings in which the image originates in 3D modeling software, using this logic to construct a landscape or structure. The chosen image of the structure is then transferred onto the canvas, taking on physical form to be contemplated by the viewer. This reality that resembles the real is the space into which you are invited to enter.
→ Vikenti Komitski
Vikenti Komitski’s artistic practice revolves around everyday objects whose context and meaning are analyzed, scrutinized, and then transposed into another reality. Komitski alters the nature of found objects as well as that of specifically selected consumer goods, which refer back to the reality from which they originate and in which they were initially used. However, Vikenti Komitski’s use of ready-made principles applies not only to objects but also to ideas.
→ Elvire Ménétrier
Made from a composition developed by the artist, Elvire Ménétrier’s light boxes result from a mixture of soap and
glycerin. Their engraved patterns, revealing the transparency of the object, disclose the interiors of certain bodies.
→ Mihail Novakov
Inspired by the advertising industry, Mihail Novakov’s photographs draw on the conventions of commercial photography. Presented in an alluring manner, the subject depicted becomes a fetishized version of itself, reduced to a staging or simulation of reality, thereby questioning the ways in which the images that surround us are constructed. Surveillance cameras act here as seductive motifs within an environment resembling a set, with saturated and deliberately alluring colors.
→ Viktor Petrov
Viktor Petrov’s sculptures conceive the domestic space as a disciplinary system, in which desire contracts until it becomes controlled, and affection takes the form of emotional confinement. This logic of containment manifests itself in the works “Eternal Satisfaction” and “Terminal Erection.” Burnt grease and scratches on the glass-ceramic surfaces contrast with the immaculate sheen of “stainless” steel. The two materials interlock within a forced-fit structure, held together by a thick braided rubber cord. Taken together, the works dissect the strategies of patriarchal oppression and the forms of intimacy they produce. They suggest how these dynamics contribute to shaping the image of the happy home, which may ultimately reveal itself to be a trap.
→ Aaron Roth
In his paintings, photographs, and objects, Aaron Roth explores the mythologies and economic mechanisms at play within certain architectural and commercial spaces. Through the impersonal spaces of casinos and duty-free shops, as well as in his documentation of the architecture of the city of Plovdiv, Bulgaria, the artist deciphers a world whose visual and symbolic markers are grounded in an aesthetic of the fake and the counterfeit.
