Gaëlle Choisne (1975) lives and works between Paris and Fougères (Brittany, France) and around the world.
Sensitive to the issues surrounding images, which she explores through sculpture and architecture, Gaëlle Choisne develops a practice that examines the complexity of the world and its political and cultural disorder. Her work addresses, in particular, the overexploitation of nature and its resources, as well as the vestiges of colonial history, bringing together Creole esoteric traditions, myths and popular cultures.
Her projects are conceived as ecosystems of sharing and collaboration, as pockets of “resistance” in which new possibilities emerge, notably through her project Temple of Love. Initiated in response to Roland Barthes’s seminal essay A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977), Gaëlle Choisne introduces a political dimension to the concept of love, paying tribute to invisible bodies, marginalised and vulnerable souls, and dispossessed hearts. Temple of Love is an evolving project shaped by its various manifestations and origins, according to the invitations she receives and the contexts in which it unfolds. It brings together sculpture, performance, design and video.
Gaëlle Choisne’s works and installations have been exhibited in numerous institutions, including Piccola Scuola Zattere (Venice), Reiffers Art Initiatives (Paris), MAC VAL (Vitry-sur-Seine), Konschthal – Esch-sur-Alzette (Luxembourg), Centrale Powerhouse (Montreal), CAFA Museum (Beijing), Pera Museum (Istanbul), MAM – Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Musée Fabre (Montpellier), Zachęta National Gallery of Art (Warsaw), The Mistake Room (Los Angeles), Bétonsalon (Paris), G—und project space (Berlin), MAMO – Centre d’art de la Cité Radieuse (Marseille), Centre d’art contemporain La Halle des bouchers (Vienne), Musée archéologique Henri-Prades (Lattes), and Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, among others.
She has also participated in numerous biennials and triennials, including the 14th Taipei Biennial (2025), the 15th Gwangju Biennale (2024), the 3rd Toronto Biennial of Art (2024), the 5th New Museum Triennial in New York (2021), the 11th Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA, 2021), the 13th Sharjah Biennial (2017), the 14th Curitiba International Biennial (2017), the 13th Lyon Biennale (2015), and the 12th Havana Biennial (2015).
She has taken part in numerous residency programmes in France and internationally, including at the Manufacture de Sèvres, Bethanien–KW (Berlin), the Rijksakademie (Amsterdam), the Meeting Points Collaboration with CCA – Campus Caraïbéen des Arts (Martinique), Atelier Van Lieshout (Rotterdam), the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris with Art Explora, and OPTICA & Art3 Valence (Montreal).
In 2024, she was awarded the Prix Marcel Duchamp, and in 2021, the AWARE Prize. In 2019, she was nominated for the Prix de la Fondation Ricard.
Gaëlle Choisne is represented by Kaufmann Repetto (Milan and New York), 193 Gallery (Paris and Venice), and Nicoletti (London).
Composed like Cecil Taylor’s mirror-music, the present exhibition recounts the vibratory encounter between Lorna Simpson and Gaëlle Choisne, punctuated by their comings and goings towards each other, like the fleeting notations of a score in the making for a four- hand piece. Intertwined from one floor to the other for the duration of the joint performance that is their exhibition, their works oscillate between the archives of the present and the reper- toire of the contemporary. Simpson’s works—her paintings, of apparent formal coherence, her conceptual photographs imbued with serial rigor—and Choisne’s—collages and assemblages of apparently chaotic or rather «chaordic» facture, between order and chaos, to borrow the artist’s expression, and truly esoteric, even mystical compositions—do not seek harmony within themsel- ves any more than between them.
As black women artists their Afro-diasporic filiation is the taut red thread of their practice, between representation, abstraction and documentation, bifurcation and obfuscation of and in their sources, breaking with essentialist assignations as much as steering away from the search of rootedness. Their native and adoptive Caribbean genealogy, from one generation to the next— Cuban and Jamaican for Lorna—Haitian for Gaëlle with Mexican and Cuban influences—trans- cribes their globalized experiences and transcends their circumstantial American and French ci- tizenship, respectively.
In this unique and unprecedented joint exhibition, a common attention to nature as an endangered species, erupts between the image of women and traditional representations of the landscape. Polar in Lorna’s work, tropical in Gaëlle’s, nature discovers and covers black faces and racialized spaces through visual cracks in the canvas while left-over concrete slates, cardboard ribbings, brass mesh, and chained shells unite and separate life and art in a vast «material squabbling»* (Choisne).