Solo show

Gäelle Choisne (1985, FR) lives and works in Paris. Sensitive to contemporary issues, Gaëlle Choisne’s practice considers the complexity of the world, its political and cultural disorder, whether it be the over-exploitation of nature, its resources, or the vestiges of colonial history, where Creole esoteric traditions, myths and popular cultures mingle. Her projects are conceived as ecosystems of sharing and collaboration, pockets of «resistance» where new possibilities are created, notably with the «Temple of Love» project. Initiated from Roland Barthes’ original essay on love, «Fragments d’un discours amoureux» (1977), Gaëlle Choisne adds a political dimension to the concept of love by paying homage to invisible bodies, minority and fragile souls, and dispossessed hearts. «Temple of love » is an evolutionary project defining itself through its modes of appearance and genesis according to its invitations and its location. The works/installations of Gaëlle Choisne have been exhibited in many institutions: (Vitry-sur-Seine), Centrale Powerhouse (Montreal), CAFA Museum (Beijing), Pera Museum (Istanbul), MAM - Musée d’art moderne de Paris, Musée Fabre (Montpellier), Zacheta Gallery (Warsaw), The Mistake Room (Los Angeles), Bétonsalon (Paris), Gr_und project space (Berlin), MAMO - Centre d’art de la Cité radieuse de Marseille, La Villette x Pompidou (Paris), Centre d’art contemporain La Halle des bouchers (Vienne), Musée archéologique Henri-Prade (Lattes), Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon etc. She has also participated in several biennials and triennials: 15th Gwandju Biennial (2024), 3rd Toronto Biennial of Art (2024), 5th New Museum Triennial (2021), 11th International Biennial of Contemporary Art (GIBCA), 13th International Biennial of Lyon (2015), 12th Havana Biennial (2015), Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017) and 14th Curitiba Biennial (2017). She has been part of many residency programs in France and internationally such as “Meeting Points collaboration” with CCA -Campus Caraïbéen des Arts (Martinique), Bethanian-KW (Berlin), the Rijksakademie (Amsterdam), Atelier Van Lieshout (Rotterdam), the Cité Internationale des Arts de Paris and OPTICA & Art3 Valence (Montreal). In 2024, Gaëlle Choisne won the Marcel Duchamp Prize and, in 2021, the AWARE Prize. In 2019, she is nominated for the Ricard Foundation Prize and the Sam Art Project. Gaëlle Choisne is represented by the gallery Air de Paris, Romainville (FR).

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Aquarium Biennial Fair Fruits Installation Love Performance Plants Sculpture Shells Stèles Temple of Love Videos Workshop

Ruche, 2024

Ruche (Beehive) is an original installation of 5 beehives exhibited for the Prix Marcel Duchamp 2024 exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, of which Gaëlle Choisne was the winner.

Each Ruche is made from cork, plaster and chicken wire.

Projection on glazed ceramic.

for all artworks: Courtesy of the artist and Air de Paris, Romainville, Grand Paris

Photo credit: Marc Domage
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Ruche – École des Actes, 2020-2024
Film 16/9, digital, colour, sound, 29 minutes.
Commissioned by Les Nouveaux Commanditaires, France Relance and NextGenerationEU

Ruche – Accumulation Primitive, 2021-2024
Film 16/9, digital, colour, sound, 50 minutes

Ruche – Creole Garden in Normandie, 2024
Film 16/9, digital, colour, sound, 29 minutes
Commissioned by the Toronto Art Biennial 2024

Ruche – Love letter to La Siren, 2024
Film 16/9, digital and digitised super-8, colour, sound, 8 minutes
With the kind support of Meeting Point, Art explora and La Villa Médicis

Mentorship, Reiffers Art Initiatives - Gaëlle Choisne

Reiffers Art Initiatives - Paris, 2023
Photo © Aurélien Mole

Mentorship, Reiffers Art Initiatives, 2023

Reiffers Art Initiatives - Paris, 2023
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Lorna Simpson is the mentor of artist Gaëlle Choisne for the third edition of the 2023 Reiffers Art Initiatives mentorship program. The exhibition will be presented at the Reiffers Art Center on the occasion of Art Basel Paris.

For this latest edition of its Mentorship Program, Reiffers Art Initiatives will present an exhibition by artist Gaëlle Choisne, accompanied by her mentor Lorna Simpson – a pioneer in the 80s of conceptual photography that closely links text and image – whose work has been exhibited in numerous prestigious art institutions and events, including the Venice Biennale in 1990. Born in Cherbourg and living in Paris, Gaëlle Choisne is a French artist whose artistic approach is guided by multiple inspirations. In her installations, created at the crossroads of sculpture and photography, she evokes her relationship with her Haitian origins. Represented by Galerie Air de Paris, the artist has already exhibited internationally, notably in London, Kyoto and the United States.

Maât and the tears of God – Aware Prize - Gaëlle Choisne

Maât and the tears of God, Gaëlle Choisne © Espace Croisé.

Maât and the tears of God – Aware Prize, 2024

Espace Croisé Contemporary Art Center, Roubaix, France, 2024.
Exhibition co-produced by AWARE (Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions) as part of the AWARE 2021 Prize, in partnership with DCA - Association française de développement des centres d'art contemporain.

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With the exhibition Maât and the tears of god, artist Gaëlle Choisne is raising an Egyptian temple in the former neo-Gothic convent of the Clarisse sisters.

Maât, the goddess of Egyptian mythology, embodies fairness, peace and justice for all. It was also a founding concept of Pharaonic Egypt. She is the manifestation of a universal, unchanging order that enables the world to exist. The cosmic order is one with the human order. They are one and the same. Maât personifies the balance needed for a more egalitarian society.

Gaëlle Choisne’s works suggest we do the same, to give voice to stories that have been silenced for too long. Like a gateway between different spiritualities, the exhibition blends esoteric Haitian traditions with the ancient convent, a symbol of the Catholic faith. Intimately linked to the artist’s origins, this interweaving denounces the violence associated with racism and colonisation.

Gaëlle Choisne’s installations interweave different materials (organic, noble, recycled), like monuments erected in homage to invisibilised bodies. The video installation AURA/ARUA (2023) shows a ritual dance performed by Haitian artist Kettly Noël projected onto a brass plate engraved with talismanic symbols. The work is being shown simultaneously at Netwerk Aalst in Belgium as part of the exhibition Ritual in Transfigured Time in honour of avant-garde dancer and filmmaker Maya Deren.

Reuse, seen as a form of rebirth, is found in Love is Healing – Yeshua (2022), in which two deer antlers are assembled, gilded and hung. The ‘slaughter’ of a deer refers to the head and antlers being cut off and kept as a trophy after the hunt. The work reflects the double meaning of this term. Nevertheless, as the title suggests, love is healing, and this is what Gaëlle Choisne resolves to respond to the violence.

Drawing inspiration from Maât, the artist imagines an alternative narrative: addressing wounds through the prism of love to heal them better. At the heart of the exhibition, several layers of narratives are revealed, like multiple landscapes, offering each of us the chance to think about a more loving world.

Extract from a text by Émilie Notéris

Temple of Love – Tutti Sistemati, Toronto Biennial - Gaëlle Choisne

Gaëlle Choisne, Temple of Love – Tutti Sistemati (A Creole Garden in Normandy), 2024. Photography: Toni Hafkenscheid

Temple of Love – Tutti Sistemati, Toronto Biennial, 2024

3rd Toronto Biennial of Art, Toronto, Canada
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Temple of Love – Tutti Sistemati is a commissioned sculptural video installation that introduces a new version of Temple of Love. Inspired by Roland Barthes’s book A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977) and the chapter “Tutti sistemati”, this new work advocates for land preservation and promotes an ecological contemplation of our world: it addresses the complex relationship between Normandy and Haiti, revealing the history of Creole gardens, colonial pasts, and mythical tales. Through the perspective of créolité, the artist invites viewers to explore the crossroads of collective and personal histories while considering themes of genealogy, healing, resistance, empowerment, and gender in greater depth. Temple of Love stimulates reflections on the intricacies of this shared history and offers glimpses of hope for a more inclusive and sustainable future. Gaëlle’s guests for Temple of Love – Tutti Sistemati are Arvo Leo and Audrey Parisot. The images for the video are credited to Makoto C. Friedmann.

Gaëlle Choisne is a visual artist who engages with contemporary global issues through her multimedia practice. Her work reflects upon colonial history and the remnants of its political and cultural turmoil and exploitation of nature by incorporating Creole traditions, myths, and popular cultures. Her projects, especially Temple of Love (2022–24), operate as collaborative ecosystems that question societal norms and imagine new possibilities.

L’Ère du Verseau – Marcel Duchamp Prize - Gaëlle Choisne

Exhibition view L'Ère du Verseau, Gaëlle Choisne, Marcel Duchamp Prize, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2024. Credit : Marc Domage

Gaëlle Choisne, winner of the Marcel Duchamp Prize 2024, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2024. Credit : Luc Castel

L’Ère du Verseau – Marcel Duchamp Prize, 2024

Exhibition L'Ère du Verseau by Gaëlle Choisne, Marcel Duchamp Prize 2024, Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Gaëlle Choisne is the winner of the Marcel Duchamp Prize 2024, awarded by the ADIAF.
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The precession of the equinoxes is an astronomical concept that describes the displacement of the axis around which our planet rotates, affecting the position of the stars as seen from Earth. It returns to its original point every 26,000 years: in astrology, this cycle is broken down by the twelve constellations of the zodiac to associate them with a particular era. So, we are in the process of leaving the age of Pisces for the age of Aquarius, with its virtues of abundance, transformation and hope. Under these cosmic omens, Gaëlle Choisne invites visitors to the Marcel Duchamp Prize to enter a large- scale installation showcasing her work as a video artist, sculptor and painter.

An indefatigable creator of artistic environments that go beyond the exhibition to include banquets, workshops, gardening, body treatments, concerts and performances, Gaëlle Choisne has been building an experimental, multi-faceted archipelago- work for the past ten years. Resolutely curious, her practice embraces a multitude of media and skills, which she hijacks creatively without concern for canon or tradition. A devotee of kitsch aesthetics, her works sweep everyday objects along with them (coins, cigarettes, key rings, false nails), talismans and other carefully collected finds. A builder trained in scenography, she manipulates industrial materials (plaster, concrete, silicone), ceramics and precious metals with the same affection. From this position of referential impurity2 that runs through her work, she deals with the question of the image and the archive as a ‘self-ethnographer’, in other words by tampering with colonial systems of representation through a practice of video and photography that is both reflexive and anthropological. In her films in particular, she allows herself to borrow the voice and tone of the coloniser, while at the same time hijacking its objects of study. Infused with Caribbean diasporic imaginations and a Haitian and French family history, Gaëlle Choisne’s work resonates with the Black Fantasy movement imagined by the British curator Ekow Eshun in a book and exhibition entitled Black Infinity. It brings together artists who find a generative tension between the everyday and the extraordinary to produce new narratives of Black potential. Black fantasy ‘testifies to the conviction that African cultural beliefs and practices are worthy of sincere, rather than sarcastic, consideration as sources of knowledge and creative inspiration’3.

At the Centre Pompidou, Gaëlle Choisne presents an immense carpet of ‘poured cork’ flooring on which five monoliths represent beehives, burrows or termite mounds. Adorned with intricate metalwork, chains and shells, these promontories house small video theatres showing five films made by the artist since 2020 during her travels in Haiti, the Caribbean and Latin America. Initially trained in the dramatic arts, this gesture of miniaturisation reflects her interest in Brecht’s reflections and in epic theatre, which aims to make the spectator aware of his position within the work. From this stellar observation station that plays with scale, the audience can examine a range of human activities: in L’école des actes, the collective fantasising and reclamation of journeys into exile in the Paris region; in Accumulation Primitive, a political and poetic feminist fable about Haiti; in Creole garden in Normandie, sensual gardening in which the plants are the main characters. At the back of the room, the huge paintings on wood from the Safe space for a passing history-Age of Aquarius 99999 series combine pictorial surges, glyphs and talismans with AI-generated faces of strangers. At once a tribute to the activists of the black liberation struggles and a fictional family tree, they act as a cosmogonic cartography that keeps us asking: where are we?

THOMAS CONCHOU