Common Ground : Maria Bodil, Amaury Darras, Jim Jarmusch, Philippe Jarrigeon, Jennifer Latour, Damien Moulierac, YZA Voku, Olivia Wünsche

5 February - 4 April 2026

Overview

The Womanray gallery is pleased to present Common Ground, its first exhibition bringing together eight multidisciplinary artists whose narratives explore the visual representations of the body. Situated between spaces of memory and new territories to explore, this exhibition presents itself as a zone of convergence. It allows these bodily narratives to unfold, highlighting their symbolic and political markers. Through photography,sculpture, and digital art, the artists propose hybrid forms where boundaries between mediums blur and images subvert conventional genres.

The artists draw upon fiction to bring mythological bodies to life. Transcending the boundaries of reality, they become tellers of fantastic fables. Jennifer Latour stages floral specimens whose stems reinvent limbs and whose corollas reinterpret faces. These protean creatures correspond to the collection of Amaury Darras,whose wood bears the ghosts of a parallel civilization, sketches the contours of absent flesh, and bears witness to ancestral-futuristic vestiges. As for Jim Jarmusch's figures, they are originally anchored in lived experience: archives or journalistic documentation. The surrealist reappropriation of the collages rewrites their history, meditating on a dreamlike memory.

Bodies also become tools of experimentation. They represent a vast playground for the artists' mental laboratory, an infinitely generative motif that can be distorted, constrained, or dissolved. The bodies thus bear the scars of these symbolic attacks. YZA Voku and Maria Bodil use artificial intelligence to dismember their figures and transform the portrait. The former depicts them faceless, questioning the loss of individual identity and transforming them into technological puppets. Maria Bodil fragments anatomy and disintegrates bodies,stripped of their individuality, preserving only their erotic charge. Damien Moulierac concludes this process of stripping down by recreating the memory of a finished party. The reclining figures embody the traces of a furious presence before the death of exaltation. The bodies are left to oblivion, lost in a space dissolved by silence.

Finally, the bodies in Common Ground take on an allegorical function, reflecting their era to establish a political perspective. Philippe Jarrigeon appropriates the aesthetics of the late 20th century, marked by liberalism.Choosing humor and derision while often drawing on popular culture phenomena, he mocks Western excesses and uses bodies as staging devices. These shells are saturated with their own sarcastic substance,playing their dual role as agents and products of consumerism. Olivia Wunsche, conversely, delivers a direct anti-imperialist discourse through a photographic series documenting her journey to Peru, in collaboration with the NGO Alianza Arkana. The physicality of bodies is rare there, but the allusion to their colonization is omnipresent. Wunsche shapes a new cosmogony of an inanimate world, inhabited by symbolic beings,bearing witness to resistance against the hegemony and opulence of one group at the expense of another.

Antoine Bouffard