Sixty sumptuous Caucasian nudes are being presented alongside a handful of sublime African sculptures and masks. Only Bettina Rheims could have managed such an exhibition. Entitled Vous êtes finies, douces figures [You are done, gentle figures], it has just opened at the Musée des Arts Premiers of the quai Branly in Paris. The photos, all medium format Polaroids, are wonderful. So is the filmed an interview between the photographer and her exhibition curator and collaborator Philippe Dagen.
Although the exhibition borrows its title from the Latin poet Petronius, he is not the subject of the show. This fated phrase was tattooed on the skin of one of the Femen Bettina Rheims photographed for her recent series Naked War. Gentle figures, were they? Rather heroines, to take up the title of another series by the artist, of which a secret portion is revealed here, including never-before-seen Polaroids. We see less gentleness than intensity: beings that are terribly alive, struggling with a denuded place, a sort of rock, and their own bodies.
Femen and Heroines were thus destined to meet and together assert the power and dignity of the feminine — not to be confused with the common sense of the word “femininity” which is a mere social and sexual stereotype. Embodied in the flesh and in the sculpted faces, these qualities are also shared by yet other heroines: the African artworks which the artist set side by side her own for the duration of this conversation between photographs and sculptures.
Bettina Rheims, Vous êtes finies, douces figures
March 20 to June 3, 2018
Musée du quai Branly – Jacques-Chirac
37 Quai Branly
75007 Paris
France
