The House of Dust

Sixty years of women's creative work in a journey spanning generations, nationalities and disciplines

Echoing its programming, attentive to women artists, the MAMC+ proposes a new hanging from its collections that strives to improve the visibility of women’s creation, which represents only about 4% of its 20 000 artworks.

This exhibition borrows its title from a key artwork by Alison Knowles recently acquired by the Musée. An American artist, sculptor and poetess, co-founder of the Fluxus movement, Alison Knowles created The House of Dust in 1967, a multimedia installation based on the model of a performance, a reference artwork that constitutes one of the very first digital poems on the history of art. It is located at the crossroads of computer innovation, conceptual art (through its administrative aesthetic) and Fluxus.

The exhibition brings together around forty artists in a visit intertwining generations (from the 1960s to the present day), nationalities and disciplines. The project enjoys a partnership with the Centre national des arts plastiques, which is providing the loan of around fifty artworks for the occasion, the majority of which will join the museum’s collection on long-term loan.

While this exhibition is founded on the criteria of gender, it does not claim to essentialise women’s artistic creation, but instead seeks to pursue the establishment’s inclusive policy, the rereading of its history and the discovery of its little-known or newly acquired collections. This all-female exhibition, assembling over 130 artworks — paintings, installations, photographs, design objects, etc. — thus allows three main themes to be explored, illustrating recurrent concerns shared by these contemporary creative artists: language, body and materials.

ARTISTS PRESENTED

(The works of the artists in bold belong to the collections of the Centre national des arts plastiques and are on loan to MAMC+.) :

Magdalena Abakanowicz, Marina Abramović, Laurie Anderson, Eleanor Antin, Geneviève Asse, Anna-Eva Bergman, Louise Bourgeois, Lisetta Carmi, Sarah Charlesworth, Marieta Chirulescu, Marinette Cueco, Sari Dienes, Thea Djordjadze, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Gloria Friedmann, Shirley Goldfarb, Nan Goldin, Jan Groover, Guerrilla Girls, Sheila Hicks, Jenny Holzer, Dorothy Ianonne, Kimsooja, Karen Knorr, Alison Knowles, Barbara Kruger, Laura Lamiel, Helen Levitt, Annette Messager, Tania Mouraud, Gina Pane, Sheila Reid, Takako Saito, Valentine Schlegel, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Jessica Stockholder, Nathalie Talec, Tatiana Trouvé, Jackie Winsor