Artists: Fabienne Audéoud, Anne-Lise Coste
Exhibition title: Cancer de la gorge
Curated by: Oriane Durand
Venue: Le Berceau, Marseille, France
Date: August 30 – September 27, 2020
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Le Berceau, Marseille
Cancer de la gorge (Throat cancer) is what you can read on cigarette packs in France since 2011. Most of the time, these words are accompanied by images showing tongues infested with pus, amputated limbs or people at the end of their lives. In the meantime, packets of cigarettes with this warning are circulating next to us without our attention. Throat cancer might thus correspond to this trivialization, a current state of an overused language, full of words emptied of their meaning and weight: a state, which makes messages pass by on the sly and makes truths disappear.
For this first exhibition at Le Berceau – a half inhabited temporary exhibition space – , Fabienne Audéoud (*1968 in Besançon, lives and works in Paris) and Anne-Lise Coste (*1973 in Marignane, lives and works in Orthoux) have each conceived a new series of works. The paintings of Fabienne Audéoud represent images of hummus associated with texts taken from the internet. This culinary preparation from the Middle East is shared between friends – by dipping your bread in it during convivial meetings. At the same time, it is widely shared and commented on as a very serious nutritional issue on the web. If in Audéoud’s case, sentences and images are used as pre-texts, those of Anne-Lise Coste act more frontally. “Police”, “Rape”, “Whore”, “Poetry”, each word operates as directly as possible and lays bare pain, violence and joy. In the manner of the writer Annie Ernaux, they are “words without metaphors, without effects, with a sharp blade that slices through life”.
