The heritage of anthropological museums, monuments and steles, linked to colonial and post-colonial histories, are the research engines for the sculptural landscapes she elaborates. With the support of Western and overseas (Haiti) tales and legends, Gaëlle Choisne reveals the traces of a mute history, and thus summons the idea of a local exoticism.

With its title evoking one of the world’s largest slums located in Haiti, the installation Cité Soleil (2014) functions as the backbone of this exhibition: a veritable landscape that is both strangely chaotic and ordered, this protean structure gives rhythm to the space while serving as a support for the presentation of sculptures, photographs, and videos, among which Cric Crac, which gives its title to the exhibition. In Cric Crac #1 (2013), Gaëlle Choisne went to Haiti to film two guides at the colonial museum in Moulin-sur-Mer who tell stories about zombies – an eminently political and colonial figure – and Haitian werewolves.

She continues this investigation in Cric Crac #2 (2015), which documents and exposes some of the complexities of Haitian culture as it confronts the weight of dominant imperialism. The artist’s attraction to the blending of cultures is reflected in a series of works produced especially for the exhibition, inspired by the ancient heritage of the City of Vienna.

Between occult fables and objective science, between Caribbean Haiti and and ancient Vienna, Gaëlle Choisne proposes to the visitor to wander in a universe rich universe of multiple references, constituting by that very fact as many tracks to to understand a post-colonial universe that constantly oscillates between between fiction and reality, nostalgia and fantasy.

Exhibition realized with the kind collaboration of the Centre de Restauration et d’Études Archéologiques Municipal (CRÉAM), and the Museums of Vienna.

Defixio in Latin, κατάδεσμος / katádesmos in ancient Greek, are the most widespread type of evidence that has come down to us of ancient magic from the sixth century BC to the sixth century, throughout the Greco-Roman world. Attested in the literature, the practice literally consists of nailing, binding a person. The aim of defixion would be to subject another human being to one’s will, to render him or her incapable of acting according to one’s own will, a practice nowadays called bewitchment. The defixiones amatoriae aim at attracting a loved one, and this most often in a definitive and immediate way. This exhibition would therefore have the same purpose. To subject human beings to act otherwise than by their own will, in a common destiny in favor of a full consciousness for a respect and a love of the mixed cultures and of the Nature. Défixion is therefore a particular spell. The exhibition appears as the space of a temple destined to offerings of different natures: offerings in gratitude to the universe to allow us to (re)fall in love with it, offerings to forgive mankind for the disasters we commit on Earth or to reflect on the question of giving as with « Do not banish me from your heart ».

The artist Gaëlle Choisne introduces the living into the rooms of the museum: she welcomes the visitors’ bodies as the very subject of the project and implements the principle of hospitality so precious to the MAC VAL, in order to consider and care for them. Invited to invest the spaces of the museum, Gaëlle Choisne proposes a total project that takes place in her exploration of Roland Barthes’ Fragments d’un discours amoureux, entitled « Temple of Love », a realization implemented for several years in different places as it was for example the case at Bétonsalon, in 2018.

This new occurrence at the MAC VAL, Atopos, is declined in the heart of the exhibition space of the collection « Bare Hands », in front of other works. Through furniture and sculptural devices it proposes forms of reception of the public, inviting them to participate and listen to artistic interventions programmed by the artist: philosopher, artist, musician, anthropologist, masseur… about twenty interventions will take place in these installations that can be activated during one year.

Gaëlle Choisne accompanies the works in the collection with living things, with what is the very essence of humanity: philosophy, thought, contact, the thirst to become, germination, life.
Here, once again, his project is placed under the sign of love and relationships with others, an experience to live love as a political, social and solidarity response.
An ecosystem at the service of the living.

Love, a word that makes us blush. So we translate it into ‘Wicked!’ or into actions.
At the MAC VAL, in Vitry-sur-Seine, I invite all visitors to be careful with this word so delicate that we vulgarise it or do not speak it. Here, it is yours and for you, for all of you, but especially for the mino-rities, for those left behind, for the abandoned, for the sidelined, for the originals. It accompanies your steps and everything you see from me is made with it. I am trying to tell you that you are unique, original and never interchangeable, you are singular creatures to be loved and I invite you to start with yourself. Take this chance to settle down, to feel through the breath of your lives, through the struggles but also through the laughter, through a sigh, a soothing. I offer you spaces in the museum, a lull in a benevolent place, to feel good, to do sport, to find yourself. The museum is indeed a place that is made for this, not only for connoisseurs or professionals, but for all those who want to expe-rience, to feel.Ode to love for all! (Gaëlle Choisne)

Guests
— Les Apprenant*e*s de l’école des actes
— Marie-Carmel Brouard
— Contemporaines
— Gabriel Fontana
— Caroline Honorien
— Nge Lay et Aung Ko
— Roxanne Maillet et Célia Gaultier
— Gloria Maso
— Pascale Obolo et Afrikadaa
— Anouchka Oler Nussbaum
— Elisabetta Potasso
— Emmanuelle Soum

Temple of Love – To Hide at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, is a new phase of Temple of Love – a long-term project aiming at a global reunification of the living through the concept of love. This exhibition, freely inspired by the chapter ‘To hide’ in Roland Barthes A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, is resolutely oriented towards self-recon-struction through the sharing of experience, connec-tion to one’s ancestors, respect for heritage and inner corporal harmony.

With Ahuehuete, Pablo Altar, Arghtee, ASMR STACY, Association Agonessan, Mykki Blanco, Marie-Carmel Brouard, Cardi B, Jean Chesnel, Crystallmess, Virginie Despentes, Sidney Drew, Léo Dupré, Silvia Federici, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, Zoe Leonard, Audre Lorde, Agnes Noel, Euvonie Reynald and Megg Rayara Gomes de Oliveira, Madame Café, Karl Marx, Nicki Minaj, Djibril Sall, Spice, Lorenzo Targhetta, Christiane Taubira, Simone Thiébaut, Assa Traoré, Françoise Vergès, Amber Wagner, Tierra Whack.

Blue Lights in the Basement is the first solo exhibition by French-Haitian artist Gaëlle Choisne in the UK. Describing her work as a ‘kaleidoscopic prism with multiple entries of meanings and signs’, Choisne’s practice revolves around the creation of opulent environments in which the artist interweaves myriad references – from occult fables to objective sciences, through to Caribbean and European literary traditions, queer culture, music and popular imagery –, and media, including sculpture, photography, video, text and sound.

In Blue Lights in the Basement, Choisne presents a series of hybrid assemblages made of a wide range of materials such as wood, textile, ceramic, photographs and moving images, as well as a vast array of found objects, including coins, banknotes, deer antlers and cigarettes. Layering a multitude of narratives, the artworks on display explore the relationships between human beings and their environment – whether it be social, cultural or natural –, analysing the effects that these interactions have on subjectivity. To do so, the artist brings a historical perspective to her own experience, establishing poetic parallels between her personal life, her relationship to sexuality and her skin colour, and the history of Haiti, specifically the Haitian Revolution (22 August 1791–1 January 1804).

Throughout the exhibition, Choisne draws inspiration from the women who played a role in the Revolution and the broader history of Haiti, such as slave and soldier Marie-Jeanne Lamartinière, who served in a male uniform at the Battle of Crête-à-Pierrot (4 March–24 March 1802), or Catherine Flon, who sew the first Haitian flag in 1803. Often muted by historiography, these female voices embody a spirit of bravery and rebellion, affirming the existence of those left out of dominant historical narratives. Through the evocation of these providential figures, the artist questions the way in which processes of invisibilisation operate, drawing our attention to what happens beyond the regimes of the visible and the tangible – in both socio-political and spiritual realms, which Choisne’s transversal gaze tightly interlinks.

Indeed, a logic of crossing, of passage between perceptible and ineffable worlds, spans the exhibition, such as, for instance, in Anathem (2022), a group of three assemblages evoking the form of doors or thresholds. Made of pine wood, ceramic, dyed fabric and printed textile showing, alternatively, a hand (the maker), a magician and a public demonstration (the revolted), the Anathem series evokes the intricate links between practices calling for socio-political justice and rituals aiming to reach a spiritual ‘beyond’.

These connections between history and spirituality, politics and beliefs, also appear in Echo of your EGO (2022), an installation in which cigarettes produced by one of the oldest brands of tobacco (Sobranie, established in London in 1879, smoked by the Imperial House of Russia and the Royal House of Great Britain, owned today by Japan Tobacco), materially encapsulate residues of colonial times. These cigarettes are presented on blocks of ceramic covered by an enamel made of crushed glass taken from hospital needles, recalling the cyclical dance of life and death, as in a vanity.

Similarly, the film Silent Primitive Accumulation (2018–22), which is played on mute to remind us of those who remain voiceless, is presented as part of a series of installations in which the screens are supported by metal, root-like feet, giving the impression of an energetic web sprawling from the underground. Here, the notion of ‘basement’, as suggested by the exhibition title, seems to refer to these unconscious forces that even those who have been disempowered can potentially access.

Indeed, borrowed from an album released by African American singer and activist Roberta Flack in 1977, Blue Lights in the Basement evokes the deep, sensual atmosphere of clubs when slow music is played. It also refers to David Hammons’ Concerto in Black and Blue, presented at Ace Gallery, New York, in 2002, a sensory experience where ‘light failed to provide full visibility, and colour remained helpless in grounding materiality’, bringing a singular prism to questions of race, essence and spirituality.

Similar ideas are explored in Choisne’s exhibition, where the colour blue becomes the symbol of what has been made imperceptible or impalpable, but whose presence continues to haunt reality. Attempting to conjure the effective power and potential of invisible energies, her artworks are not conceived as inert objects, illustrative or evocative of external ideas, but as force fields, composed of both physical and immaterial components. Within this framework, the image of the basement is used to conjure the idea of a hidden space where reproved practices, such as queer cruising, persist in existing; a space where, acting as the glue that holds the building blocks of her assemblages together, love is the ultimate sediment.

Gaëlle Choisne will present the Frankfurt debut of her long-term project “Temple of Love” (2018-ongoing) and transform the historic Villa 102 into an art space. A meticulous collector of objects acting at the margins of photography, the artist weaves individual memories with social observations to create eclectic installations, videos and performances. Drawing on her personal history and French-Haitian heritage, Choisne’s works often delve into themes of self-healing, spirituality and social interaction. Choisne regards her artistic practice as part of a network of ideas and people, frequently engaging in collaborations and integrating literary and scholarly allusions into her work. For the “To Hide” edition of the long-term project “Temple of Love”, the artist once again refers to a chapter from Roland Barthes’ “A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments”. The site-specific installation takes on a new form with each presentation. Choisne developed the exhibition for the first time during her one-year residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, in cooperation with KfW Stiftung.

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

The exhibition Temple of Love. Cœur concludes the residency of Gaëlle Choisne (Cherbourg, 1985) at Scuola Piccola Zattere. Here, new commissions, site-specific interventions and existing works by the artist are put in dialogue with a selection of paintings by Haitian artists from the Jean-Marie Drot collection. 

Temple of Love is a long-term project (2018 – ongoing) developing across successive chapters and drawing from Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977). Through an approach that combines multiple media, techniques and materials, Choisne builds a progressive, evolving narrative that shapes spaces of coexistence and collaboration, hospitality and affection.

What the artist calls a “temple” is this fluid configuration that is temporarily embedded into the architectural and institutional context of the museum, materially and symbolically turning it into a place where new rules and bonds can emerge. The ritual and sacral connotations are summoned by Choisne not to reproduce the auratic dimen- sion of the museum, which derives from acts of separation and classification, but, on the contrary, to hybridize forms of knowledge that belong to different spheres, cultures and histories. 

In the new chapter of Temple of Love, entitled Cœur after the eponymous entry from Barthes’book, the spiritual and affective connection between the body and the outer world is explored through the symbolism of the house: the architecture of the domestic that hosts, embraces, protects. The exhibition space is reconfigured as a complex ecosystem, each room embodying a chakra, the centers located along the spine that regulate the flow of vital energy in the body. Starting with the heart, positioned at the center of museum space, the exhibition unfolds in two directions creating a circular, immersive flow, an invitation by the artist to a healing procession. The identification between architecture and body resonates in the word Lakay, meaning both house and home in the Creole language, that is depicted as a place of encounters, of spoken words, of intimate moments both sad and joyous in Haitian painting. The homeland of the artist’s mother, and a central reference throughout the artist’s work, Haiti is the guest of honor of this project, invited through the works of eighteen Haitian painters belonging to the private collection of French writer and documentary filmmaker Jean-Marie Drot. The works depict everyday scenes of collective activities and country life, blending with allusions to the ceremonies, rituals and symbols of the Vodou religion. Amplifying the scenes, figures and forms found in the paintings, the exhibition weaves a dense, affectionate and generative dialogue with the spiritual mysticism of Haitian art.

The Jean-Marie Drot collection is an idiosyncratic one comprising more than 500 artworks that Jean-Marie Drot (1929-2015) gathered during his lifetime travelling as a journalist and producer for French television. A pioneer in the use of audiovisual material in culture, Drot became well known thanks to his 1962 series The hot hours in Montparnasse in which he interviewed important figures coming from the Dada and Surrealist movements, such as Man Ray, Cocteau, and Duchamp. However, Drot’s passion focused on naif art, especially self-taught artists, from 1968 when he dis- covered an exhibition catalog with artworks by Yugoslav naif painters. This was the starting point for many adventures that led Drot to seek creative work outside the major artistic movements and Western centers of art, in places such as Bulgaria, Peru, Brazil, Haiti, Greece, Egypt and Japan. Drot’s special interest and expertise in Haitian art led him to direct the video documentary Haiti: A Painted History (1997), and to curate several exhibitions and catalogs, including Journal de voyage en Haïti au pays des peintres de la fête et du vaudou (1974), Haïti: Art Naïf, Art Vaudou (1988) and Haitian Painters: The Encounter of Two Worlds (1992). 

The Drot collection is hosted on the Cycladic island of Ios in Greece in the atypical “house-sculpture” – designed by the Greek artist and his lifelong friend Yannis Yaitis – and in a separate building inside the house complex. It is entitled the Museum of Friendship and, as of today, remains closed to the public. The collection was included in this exhibition as a first attempt at activating it through the prism of contemporary art at the initiative of the curator Eva Vaslamatzi, who has undertaken in-depth research into the Drot collection.

Irene Calderoni and Eva Vaslamatzi