PARIS.- Exploring the emotions, fantasies, and big questions that life throws at us, Klodin Erb presents her first personal exhibition in France. Sustained by art history, theatre, fashion, or popular culture, her work interrogates our desires, our concerns, and our ways of inhabiting the world.
Le Grand Drame (The Great Drama) floods the space like a scene in which tragedy rubs shoulders with the burlesque and sensitivity blends with the absurd. Her figures evolve in a universe that is at once theatrical, sensual, and profoundly alive. The colorist and gestural painting, imbued with surrealist moments and humanity, simultaneously becomes décor, stage set, and character.
Beneath the skylight, venusinfurs deploys a series of monumental paintings within frames made of fabric. Inspired as much by representations of the birth of Venus as by the Baroque ceilings of churches in Rome, these works peopled by floating, entwined, or suspended bodies comprise a free and feminist re-reading of a long pictorial tradition. Viewpoints are dramatically changed, scales are disrupted, and the figures seem to be swept along in perpetual motion.
Realized especially for this exhibition, the new video work UNIVERS PARALLELE. La Ritournelle des Animaux fous (UNIVERS PARALLELE. The Refrain of the Animals. The Beautiful and the Mad) prolongs this universe. Hybrid creatures, half-human, half-animal, roam about in a series of missed encounters, fragmented recollections, and spectral social events. Through these, Klodin Erb pursues reflections on memory, the distortions that occur in the course of a lifetime, and the fictions that we elaborate in order to give shape to our lives.
Curator: Claire Hoffmann
Monika Emmanuelle Kazi: terrain meuble
September 19–November 1, 2026
The places we inhabit often continue to inhabit us. The practice of Monika Emmanuelle Kazi brings back to life domestic spaces and familial memories sustained by her diasporic experience between Pointe-Noire in the Republic of the Congo, where she was raised, and Paris. The mobile panels in terrain meuble—a title that can mean both movable and workable terrain and also conveys the idea of a furnished terrain—become spaces of projection on which family narratives, traces of childhood, and broader histories pertaining to colonial legacies, economic exchange, and the flow of raw materials and resources are brought to the fore.
At the heart of the project is a particular attentiveness to building materials and what they can tell us. Cement, which was introduced on the African continent during the colonial period for supposedly “more enduring” constructions, has gradually replaced vernacular materials that are actually better suited to the local climates. Since it obstructs the natural circulation of air and humidity, cement causes condensation and stains to appear on the walls, which Monika Emmanuelle Kazi reinterprets as drawings or crystallizations of memory. Conversely, tropical timbers exported to Europe reappear in her works in the form of marquetry, revealing other pathways of materials, values, and histories.
The title terrain meuble simultaneously evokes the mobility, instability, and humidity of a terrain in constant flux, so inscribing the mobile installation in this same ecosystem.
Curatorial team for : Claire Hoffmann, Elise Lammer (Halle Nord, Genève), Gioia dal Molin (Haus für Kunst Uri, Altdorf).
