PARIS.- Welcome to Air de Tranny! When I look around, I start to think that Mona Filleul has built a city here. In Mona’s city, although there’s no places to go shopping, no business district or luxury hotels, there’s a metal verticality that recalls that of skyscrapers steel frames – their shine, their coldness, their texture and their angles. I can’t quite make out my reflection in the façades of these buildings, but I’m sure that I can glimpse something of our western capital cities, of their ambiguities, perhaps something of their rigidity, too. Mona takes us with her through these stripped back walls to show us what’s going on within. She marks out zones and thresholds, and builds an architecture that’s at once narrative and sentimental, emptying out all the things that usually stay hidden. She even recreates the sky…
Mona is an iconophile, one of those people who venerate images and try to save them from their certain destruction. She learned to paint by looking at the canvases of expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker and the symbolist Mikhail Vroubel, which she ended up mixing with manga and memes in her own syncretic forms. In her cathedral-less city, the bas-reliefs on insulation panels that adorn her structures seem to surround her images with a halo of sacredness: friends become angels, Instagram stories are transformed into reliquaries, and tracks become hymns... She tells me that she wants to celebrate those who have been excluded from representation, to canonise her community with the saintliness that it has long been denied.
Full of wisdom, Dolly is the mistress of ceremonies at Air de Tranny, reigning over this imaginary skyline from below as she sits at its feet and recites a poem. Bulle, meanwhile, flits about the sky, hovering for a moment above the hustle and bustle, asking herself questions and thinking about tomorrow. More pussy or more bunny? What’s the weather’s gonna be like? What are the conditions of the star system, and how can you change its synopsis? She thinks nostalgically back to some of her past romances and to the political climate which just gets worse and worse. A little exhausted, she would just like to find a mattress to lie down and rest upon for a moment…
Mona’s city has found new inhabits: she has invited Thilda Bourqui, Ix Dartayre, Miss Chakchouka, Stella Kerdraon, Rafael Moreno and Nuria Mokthar to come and populate it and to surround it with their works, their words and their interventions on the evening of the opening of Air de Tranny. Throughout her work, her exhibitions and the curatorial and collective project tr4n$f€m pr@Xis that she began with Ix Dartayre, Mona makes space for her sisters, creating new avenues for them, new passageways into the city to thwart loneliness and which let them share a bubble tea at the foot of the towers that loom above the shopping centre. Mona rewrites the names of places, twisting onomastics and sissifying them to make them more welcoming.
Air de Tranny shines bright as a star and has nothing to fear from blackouts. Mona is a lighting specialist, or perhaps a fireworks technician – she tells me how much tenderness she feels for these lights that sparkle like those of the city at night or like 24hr convenience stores, which have something reassuring and enchanting. I’m not afraid of the dark any more, and even though I can’t grasp the stars on storefronts and shop signs, when I squint, I see constellations everywhere.
A poster featuring a text by Stella Kerdraon, a photograph by Gaïa Lamarre and a design by Ernesto Luna will be distributed at the gallery.
Elements of Air de Tranny will serve as the starting point of Mona Filleul’s exhibition at the Swiss Institute, New York, opening in September 2025.
Mona Filleul is a Laureate of the 2023 Swiss Art Awards. She has had solo exhibitions at Krone Couronne, Biel, CH et Liste Art Fair Basel, CH with Gauli Zitter, CH (2024); sis123, La-Chaux-de- Fonds, CH (2022); DuflonRacz, Bern, CH (2021); Emergency, Vevey, CH (2020); and Los Atlas, Bruxelles, BE (2017). Elle a participé à des expositions collectives, dont: Kunsthaus Langenthal, Lagenthal, CH (2024); This is Us, Z33 Museum, Hasselt, BE (2023); Swiss Art Awards, Basel, CH (2023); Galerie Anton Janizewski, Berlin, DE (2022) et Etablissement d’en face, WAF Galerie, Vienna, AS (2021).
