Claire Fontaine Works
An artist talk by Claire Fontaine
This event is free and open to the public. Please join us for a reception following the talk.
Claire Fontaine is a feminist collective artist, founded in 2004 in Paris and based in Palermo. After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a “readymade artist” and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people’s work. Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seems to define contemporary art today. But if the artist herself is the subjective equivalent of a urinal or a Brillo box — as displaced, deprived of its use value, and exchangeable as the products she makes — there is always the possibility of what she calls the “human strike.” Claire Fontaine grows up among the ruins of the notion of authorship, experimenting with collective protocols of production, détournements, and the production of various devices for the sharing of intellectual and private property.
Claire Fontaine, using the third person singular feminine, is an artistic partnership between Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill. Claire Fontaine has been exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Tai Kwun, Hong Kong; Lisson Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Zurich; 4th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art; the 12th Istanbul Biennial; Manifesta 7; and the 2004 Whitney Biennial.
This visit is made possible by the generous support of the Audain Endowment for Curatorial Studies.
