Marie-Ange Guilleminot

Born in 1960 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye (FR)
Lives and works in Paris (FR)

  

Mes poupées

1993
Video, colour, sound
Duration: 32'
Purchased in: 1996

Mes poupées
Poupée

From the Chapeau-Vie (Life-Hat) (1993) – a fabric tube which turns into a pullover, dress or sleeping bag – to the evolving bag titled Le Cauris (1997), by way of performance – Gestes (Gestures) (Tel Aviv, 1994) where the artist offers her hands to the anonymous visitor through a partition – Marie-Ange Guilleminot expresses the vulnerability of bodies and beings, and the fragility and ambiguity inherent in all relationships. The artist’s body, ‘used as raw material’, and the clothing, at once a double skin and a fragile chrysalis, are exposed and expose us to a disconcerting and transgressive relationship: that of a deeply private and tactile exchange.
The artist involves her body, offering it to the eye and indecent, confused and embarrassed gesture of the onlooker invited to make an exchange. From this twofold relationship of trust and abandonment, and from this use of the body as a vehicle of communication towards the Other, there emanates an eroticism which refers everyone to their sexuality and their own limits. Marie-Ange Guilleminot cultivates ambiguity and lifts the veil of intimacy and prohibition.
In her video Mes poupées (My Dolls), she tirelessly strokes a small fabric bag wedged between her legs, softly and ambivalently. The absence of face makes the body anonymous and enables identification. As a reference to the world of childhood, this sensually handled ‘doll’ stirs up trouble, desire and guilt in the onlooker-cum-voyeur. The dolls are made with lycra tights filled with sand and seed, and covered with a protective talc, and also exist as objects offered to the user to handle, like media for the projection of his or her desires.

^{Hélène Guenin}

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